Tigers claim army shelling killed over 2,000 civilians

The cornered Tamil Tigers on Sunday accused Sri Lanka of killing up to 2,000 civilians in an artillery barrage. The army dismissed the claim as Tamil propaganda.Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels on Sunday accused the government of killing more than 2,000 civilians in 24 hours of artillery attacks, but the military denied the allegations.The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) said in a statement posted on the Tamilnet website that the army had unleashed a devastating offensive on the small coastal patch of land that the rebels still control."More than 2,000 innocent civilians have been killed in the last 24 hours," Tamilnet quoted S. Pathmanathan, the rebels' chief arms smuggler, as saying.The website said 257 bodies had been brought to a makeshift hospital that was overwhelmed with hundreds of injured casualties.Many of the dead were "found in bunkers and inside the tarpaulin tents," it said.The military dismissed the claims as propaganda, and said the guerrillas themselves had carried out the attack using mortars "to tarnish the image of the security forces in the eyes of the public nationally and internationally."Sunday's conflicting claims were characteristic of the war, in which independent reporting is impossible as journalists are banned from travelling freely in the area.A British television news team was expelled from Sri Lanka on Sunday after it broadcast allegations of poor treatment of the 200,000 Tamils who are being held in state-run camps after fleeing the fighting.