Sri Lanka'sTamil Tigers said yesterday they were resisting a major military thrust into rebel-held territory and claimed to have killed at least 25 government troops in two days of fighting.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) said they pushed back security forces from the Catholic pilgrim area of Madhu in the coastal district of Mannar where heavy fighting has raged in recent weeks.

"The Sri Lanka army adamantly initiated several clashes within 1,500 meters of the church premises," a statement said. "The LTTE defenders successfully repelled the Sri Lanka army offenders."

The separatists added that more than 90 soldiers had been wounded and placed their own losses at one killed and three hurt over the two days.

The LTTE statement came as the military said they killed 42 Tiger rebels for the loss of one soldier in the same area on Wednesday.

The latest defence ministry casualty claims bring to at least 2,562 the number of rebels said to have been killed by security forces since January’.

The ministry has reported losing 152 soldiers in the same period.

The figures given by both sides in the decades-old ethnic conflict

that has claimed tens of thousands of lives cannot be independently confirmed as journalists and rights groups are barred from front-line areas.

Meanwhile, SriXanka's govern-•ment y^stefday defoliated ftrelf* against fresh allegations it was involved in a cover-up over the massacre of ethnic-Tamil employees of a French charity. The island's human rights minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe, said Colombo was determined to "show results' from its probe into the murders and a string of other cases, rejecting allegations the government wanted to bury the crimes.

'I am as desperate as anyone else to show results,’ he told reporters, adding that each case was "complex’ butthat the government still wanted to see that "the perpetrators of these crimes are identified and dealt with."

He did not say when he ' expected the cases to be concluded.

The comments came two days after a local rights group accused •Colombo of a major cover-up of the August 2006 killing of Action Against Hunger (ACF) workers and for the first time named a list of suspects.