(Updates death toll, number of wounded) By Ranga Sirilal COLOMBO, May 28 (Reuters) - Suspected Tamil Tiger rebels attacked a police commando truck with a roadside bomb on Monday just south of the capital Colombo, killing seven civilians and wounding 36 other people, the military said. The rush-hour attack on a main road that runs past a military airport just outside the capital, is the latest in a series of such ambushes blamed on the Tigers in recent months amid a new chapter in the island's two-decade civil war. "There was a Claymore mine explosion targeting an STF (elite police commando) truck in Ratmalana," said military spokesman Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe. "It's obviously an LTTE Claymore. They have planted it in an abandoned shop," he added. He said 36 others, including six Special Task Force police commandos, were wounded. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who are fighting for an independent state in north and east Sri Lanka, were not immediately available for comment on the attack. Monday's bombing came just days after suspected Tigers targeted an army bus near the entrance to Colombo port, killing one soldier and injuring six other people. NAVAL BATTLE It also came after a fierce naval battle on Thursday off the island's far northern Jaffna peninsula in which the military and Tigers each claimed to have inflicted heavy casualties on their foe. Fighting is now focused on the north after the military captured the Tigers' eastern stronghold. The government has started to resettle the first of around 100,000 war-displaced in captured rebel areas in the eastern district of Batticaloa. However troops are still trying to rout groups of Tigers holding out in landlocked pockets in the east, and the boom of shell fire resounds daily in the area. Analysts say there is no clear winner on the horizon and fear a protracted conflict that has killed nearly 70,000 people since 1983 could rumble on for years. President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government has pledged to destroy the Tigers militarily, while the rebels have vowed to step up attacks using a homegrown air force of light planes smuggled into the country in pieces, and many observers and diplomats fear the conflict could escalate.
