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Under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, who has been killed aged 54 during fighting with the Sri Lankan army, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) were moulded, and refined, into one of the world's deadliest insurgent groups, and rigid discipline was instilled through his personal example. The LTTE of Sri Lanka, the "Tamil Tigers", would become the progenitors of modern suicide bombing. They also developed their own navy and airforce as they masterminded the art of weapons procurement in a globalised, post-cold-war world. For Prabhakaran, no sacrifice was too great for the objective of "Eelam" (precious land), a Tamil state in an island of mainly Sinhalese Buddhists. This has been particularly evident during the last four months, before Sri Lanka's President Mahinda Rajapaksa formally declared victory on Sunday. During this time, according to UN estimates, more than 6,000 civilians have been killed as the LTTE have been pushed from their northern territories into a "no fire zone", consisting of a few kilometres of north-east coastline. The government has accused the LTTE leadership of using tens of thousands of civilians trapped there as human shields. Prabhakaran was born in Valvettiturai, a fishing town almost on Sri Lanka's northern tip. The son of a minor civil servant father and a religious mother, Prabhakaran was said to have been a dutiful, introverted child. The mainly Hindu Tamil minority, concentrated on the northern and eastern fringes of the island, had done well before independence, flourishing in business and the colonial bureaucracy. The British had also imported thousands of low-caste Tamil labourers from mainland India to work the hill country tea plantations, although their lot was grimmer. But within a few years of the British departure in February 1948, Sinhalese politicians were banging the drum of ethnic chauvinism. Sinhala became the island's official language and discriminatory laws affecting entry to university and the civil service alienated moderate Tamils. The teenage Prabhakaran formed the Tamil New Tigers (TNT) in 1972. By then demands for reform by Tamil parliamentarians were being sidelined by youthful, militant separatists.