(Adds rebel statement, para 3) By Ranga Sirilal COLOMBO, Aug 27 (Reuters) - The first Tamil Tiger air raid on a Sri Lankan military target in four months wounded at least 10 navy sailors in the strategic eastern port of Trincomalee, the military said on Wednesday. Separately, Sri Lankan air force fighters pounded Tamil Tiger positions on Wednesday near their symbolic capital of Kilinochchi, but no details of casualties were available. "Ten sailors were wounded in last night's attack," military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said, referring to the air raid. He said the plane, which appeared to have dropped two bombs, escaped barrages of anti-aircraft fire. Also on Tuesday, ground fighting killed 27 rebels and two soldiers as the military kept up its push to surround the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in their northern heartland, with the aim of defeating them by the end of 2008. The LTTE said that the army's Deep Penetration Unit killed one refugee fleeing fighting and injured three more with a claymore mine in Puththuvedduvan. The military denied it attacked any civilians. The government took full control of Trincomalee last year as part of a campaign to remove the Tigers from the island's east, in which it co-opted a splinter rebel group to help it fight. It houses a major naval base to combat the rebels' small navy. The LTTE stunned the world in March 2007 when it used a single-engine airplane to bomb an air force base attached to Colombo's international airport, opening a new chapter in a 25-year civil war that has killed at least 70,000 people. Including Tuesday's bombing, the rebels have flown six aerial attacks including a strike on an air base in Anuradhapura in October and on oil storage facilities in Colombo in April 2007. The last, a bombing run on a military forward operating base in Welioya, came in April. The military and analysts say the rebels have roughly five Czech-made Zlin-143 aircraft that were smuggled into the country in pieces and re-assembled. The two-seater plane is small enough to avoid radar detection when flown low to the ground and in most cases has not been in the air long enough for jets to be scrambled to catch them, the military says. The rebels since 1983 have been fighting for a separate homeland for the ethnic minority Tamil people in the north and east of the Indian Ocean island of 21 million people, of which almost three-quarters are from the Sinhalese ethnic group. The LTTE has not made any public comment on its battlefield operations in weeks. Casualty figures are nearly impossible to verify since the war zone is restricted to reporters and most aid workers and both sides routinely distort them to their advantage.
Pope Benedict XVI makes a blessing next to Archbishop James Harvey (C) and a Swiss Guard during his weekly general audience at the Vatican August 27, 2008. Pope Benedict on Wednesday ...
