COLOMBO: The Sri Lankan military’s attempt to destroy the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and their leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran came a step closer on Wednesday when air force jets bombed a house in the northern jungles believed to be visited often by the elusive guerrilla leader, military officials said.

However, there was no independent confirmation of the strike on the building, which is in the Kilinochchi district, roughly 300 km north of the capital Colombo, said Reuters.

The attempt to kill Prabhakaran came 10 months after the LTTE’s political wing leader SP Thamilchelvan was killed, along with several other key rebels, when the air force bombed a residence in the rebel-held north.

“It is not an impossibility to get Prabhakaran. Dead or alive, we will get him soon,” government spokesman Keheliye Rambukwella said two days after President Mahinda Rajapakse told foreign correspondents that his government would consider any plea from India to hand over LTTE supremo Vellupillai Prabhakaran if he was caught alive.

Prabhakaran is blamed for masterminding the assassination of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi by a suicide bomber in 1991.

Meanwhile, due to the upsurge in violence, the government on Sept 9 ordered foreign aid workers out of the war zone, and the last United Nations team left on Tuesday, agencies add.

The pull-out prompted fears for the fate of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians displaced by the military onslaught.

The Sri Lankan government said its soldiers were just over five kilometres from Kilinochchi, the political capital of the LTTE.

“The fighting just kept getting worse,” United Nations spokesman Gordon Weiss told AFP. “We pulled out all of our 35 staff and most of our equipment.” Other international aid agencies have also completed evacuating their international staff, said Jeevan Thiyagarajah, spokesman for the Consortium of Humanitarian Agencies.“International agencies have now ceased to operate from the Wanni, except for the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross),” Thiyagarajah said.

Authorities have allowed only the ICRC – which supervises a civilian crossing point and carries out body exchanges for the military and the rebels – to remain in the north.

State security forces were widely blamed for the August 2006 massacre of 17 local employees of the French aid agency Action Against Hunger in the eastern town of Muttur.

“We are unable to guarantee their safety any more. That is why they have to leave,” President Rajapakse had told foreign correspondents recently.

But the pull-out leaves an estimated 160,000 people displaced by the escalating fighting in the rebel-held districts of Kilinochchi and Mullaittivu without international assistance.

“There is a serious danger of a major humanitarian crisis, involving anywhere between 200,000 to 300,000 civilians,” said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Sri Lankan rights group. “The imperative of defeating terrorism should not be at the cost of civilian lives and welfare.”

The Asian Human Rights Commission urged the government to carve out no-conflict zones where civilians could shelter. “Until this is successfully done all indiscriminate shelling should strictly be avoided,” the Hong Kong-based rights group said.

The Tigers have been fighting since 1983 to establish a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s ethnic minority Tamils, in a nation that has been ruled by majority Sinhala-led government since independence from Britain in 1948.