Colombo  - Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa on Thursday visited the former administrative town of the Tamil separatist rebels, which is now under the control of security forces, the president's office said.

Rajapaksa was flown to Kilinochchi, 370 kilometres north of Colombo, where he met with soldiers and toured the area to see the destruction caused in the fall of the rebels' de-facto capital in January, a statement from the office said.

Rajapaksa is the first Sri Lankan president to visit the northern town, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had their political administrative office, their own courts, police headquarters and tax offices. During the terms of the previous four presidents, the town had been held by the rebels.

Rajapaksa's administration launched an offensive in August 2006 to defeat the LTTE, which has been fighting for more than 25 years for a separate state for the Tamil ethnic minority in the northern and eastern parts of majority-Sinhalese Sri Lanka.

The government retook all of the Eastern Province early last year and since then has focused on the north and driven the rebels back to a 20-square-kilometre patch of land on the coast of Mullaitivu in the north-east.(dpa)