Sri Lanka aims to boost war budget; fighting kills 56

By Ranga Sirilal

COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's government on Thursday asked parliament to raise its war budget by 6.4 percent to $1.64 billion in 2009, as air force jets blasted Tamil Tiger camps in an unyielding push to end the 25-year-old separatist war.

The bombings, part of a near-daily campaign of hitting rebel targets from the air while ground troops battle through heavily mined jungle, came a day after fighting killed 48 rebels and eight troops, the military said.

With troops just 2 km (1 mile) from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam's (LTTE) headquarters town of Kilinochchi, the military's three-month push has intensified, with the guerrillas putting up heavy resistance in the north of the Indian Ocean nation.

"There was heavy fighting in Mullaitivu area and Vannirakulam area in Kilinochchi on Wednesday," military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said, referring to two LTTE-held zones.

The rebels were not immediately available for comment. In any case, both sides regularly offer wildly divergent accounts of the battlefield in a raging propaganda duel and the government keeps the war zone off-limits to most journalists.

On Thursday, the government presented its 2009 appropriation bill to parliament with defence component of 177.06 billion Sri Lanka rupees ($1.64 billion), or 18 percent of the total budget for next year.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government in January accused the LTTE of using a ceasefire brokered in 2002 to re-arm itself, and threw out the truce both sides had mostly ignored for two years.

He has vowed to militarily wipe out the Tigers, which are on U.S., E.U. and Indian terrorism lists, and retake the northern territory the group has fought since 1983 to claim as a separate homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority.