COLOMBO, Sept 3: Battles between Sri Lanka’s military and separatist Tamil Tiger guerillas killed at least 57 people when the rebels counterattacked against an army thrust into their strongholds, the military said on Wednesday.

The pro-rebel website www.tamilnet.com quoted the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam (LTTE) as claming they had killed 75 soldiers and wounded 100 at two locations on the northern front.

The military is pushing towards the de facto rebel capital of Kilinochchi, 330 km north of the capital Colombo, and has put its troops on the doorstep of the rebel heartland in the Indian Ocean island nation’s north.

On Tuesday, the Sri Lankan troops seized Mallavi, a town the rebels were using as a supply base, and then captured rebel defence lines a few kilometres north on the road to Kilinochchi after a fierce battle.

“The terrorists launched a counterattack to regain the lost bunker line,” the government said. Ten rebels were killed and 13 were wounded. It said 31 soldiers were also wounded.

The rebels said they had killed 30 soldiers and wounded more than 50 in the fighting.

“The LTTE fighters, engaged in fortifying different defence lines in the area, confronted (army) units that simultaneously attempted to advance,” it said.

It also quoted the rebels as saying they had killed at least 45 soldiers and wounded more than 51 during a battle that stretched from Monday into Tuesday near the port town of Nachikudah, 20 km west of Mallavi.The military said on Tuesday it had captured bunkers and mortar bases there after advancing behind air strikes.

In the rest of Tuesday’s fighting, the government said another 42 rebels were killed and 52 wounded. Seven soldiers were killed, 19 were wounded and seven were missing in action at Nachikudah, it said.

The pro-LTTE website posted a picture of what it said were seven dead army troops laid out on the ground, and said they were among 17 that had been recovered from both fronts.

On Wednesday, the Sri Lankan air force said its jets attacked two Tamil Tiger boats, destroying one and heavily damaging the other, near the beach at Alampil on the northeast coast.

In January, the government officially threw out a truce both sides had barely observed, and has budgeted $1.5 billion on the war in 2008 with the aim of wiping out the LTTE by year’s end.

The Tigers are on US, Indian and European terrorism lists, and have fought the Sri Lankan government since 1983 in one of Asia’s longest-running modern rebellions.

They say governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic majority -- three-quarters of Sri Lanka’s 21 million people -- have marginalised the ethnic Tamil minority since independence from Britain in 1948.—Reuters