COLOMBO. Feb 1: Thousands of extra police and troops poured into the Sri Lankan capital Colombo today before Independence 50th anniversary celebrations this week which are oversnadowed by fears of another Tamil Tiger suicide bombing, reports AFP.

Organisers of Wednesday's festivities, at which Britain's Prince Charles is due to be Guest of Honour, said schools tn the city of one million people would close from Monday for fears of attacks by the separatist rebels.

Plans for a children's parade on Wednesday have been scrapped, they said.

Proposals to use decorated trucks as floats have also been

cancelled following the January 25 suicide truck bombing of a temple in the central city of Kandy which killed 16 people.

Security officials salt! the main venue for the celebrations outside parliament, an exhibition centre and the main business district had been declared "high-security zones" with parking banned.

Trucks have been banned from the whole city in daylight hours without a permit.

The security officials gave no figures for the number of additional troops and police brought into Colombo. Some 10.000 of them had been due to guard Kandy, planned as the main venue for events until the

truck bombing wrecked the country's holiest Buddhist shrine, the Temple of the Tooth.

Authorities then switched the main venue to Colombo, which has been the target of numerous deadly suicide bombings during a drawn out war waged by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) for a Tamil homeland in the north and east.

Sri Lanka is the first leg of Charles's three-nation tour of South Asia, which will also take him to Nepal and the remote mountain kingdom of Bhutan. A Sri Lankan government spokesman said Prince Charles was due here on Tuesday afternoon.