The leader of Sri Lanka`s Tamil Tiger rebels, Velupillai Prabhakaran, has been killed along with his son and other Tiger commanders.

Prabhakaran was ambushed and shot dead while trying to flee government troops as special forces closed in on the last rebel fortifications.

The Sri Lankan army killed a number of other senior Tamil Tiger commanders as fighting continued to rage despite the Tigers` weekend admission of defeat.

Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, a military spokesman, told The Times that commando units and other crack government troops were trading machine gun fire with a couple of hundred of Tiger fighters hunkered down in fortified bunkers, thought to include several senior rebel leaders.

The conflict area had been reduced to a patch of land just 100 metres by 100 metres, he added. Tens of thousands of civilians who had been caught in the crossfire were finally allowed to flee to freedom over the weekend.

A senior defence official said Prabhakaran had been killed while trying to flee the area in an ambulance with two close aides

`He was killed with two others inside the vehicle,` the official said.

The government said that they had found the body of Prabhakaran`s 24 year old son Charles Anthony, the heir apparent of the Tigers` leadership.

The head of the rebels` political wing, Balasingham Nadesan, the head of the Tigers` defunct peace secretariat, Seevaratnam Puleedevan, and their eastern leader, S. Ramesh were also said to be among the dead.

Independent verification of the situation is all but impossible as journalists are not being allowed near the conflict zone. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the only neutral organisation allowed access, told The Times that it had lost contact with its 25 staff members on the battlefield yesterday morning.

At his height Prabhakaran built the Tigers into arguably the most effective terrorist organisation in the world. He pioneered the use of suicide bombers, plotted the assasination of Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, and at one time commanded about a third of Sri Lanka as he strove to build a separate Tamil state in the north of the country.

His campaign for an ethnic Tamil homeland, which he said would free the ethnic minority from the oppression of Sri Lanka`s Sinhalese Buddhist majority, cost more than 70,000 lives over 26 years.