Colombo: Sri Lanka will re-deploy thousands of elite police commandos from the country's east and move them north to help combat Tamil Tiger rebels as civil war fighting intensifies, security forces said today.

Around 2,000 Special Task Force police or STF, would move from formerly Tamil-controlled eastern provinces, now held by government troops, to areas threatened by Tiger fighters in the north, the military said.

"By redeploying the STF we will be able to free some troops for future operations in other areas," military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanyakkara said.

Since the 2006 resumption of a 25-year civil war between ethnic Tamil separatists and government forces in which 70,000 people have died, the military has recaptured the country's east.

Security forces are now pressing back Tiger rebels in their northern strongholds and have vowed to end the bloody conflict by this year or early in 2009.

Nanyakkara said 50 Tiger separatists had been killed in fighting since Wednesday, although casualty numbers are hard to verify since Nordic ceasefire monitors left the country after the government abandoned a truce agreement in January.

Both sides regularly inflate the numbers of those killed by their own fighters to maintain frontline morale. A Tiger spokesman could not immediately be reached to verify the military's claim.

Source : UNI