By Ranga Sirilal

COLOMBO, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan soldiers have entered the last town held by the Tamil Tiger separatists and were battling to take full control of it on Tuesday, the military said.

Soldiers from the 58th Division entered Puthukudiyiruppu township after heavy fighting. That is the last actual town the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) still control; after that there are only a handful of small coastal villages left.

"They are inside Puthukudiyiruppu and fighting to take control," defence spokesman Keheliya Rambukwella, also a minister, said.

On Monday, Reuters was at the frontline just to the west of the town centre, where 58 Division commander, Brigadier Shavendra Silva, said: "It's the last objective." Silva at the time said he was measuring the war in days, and not weeks.

His soldiers now have less than 6 km (4 miles) to go before they reach a 12-km long no-fire zone the army established on the Indian Ocean island's northeast coast.

It is there that he and other commanders expect a final showdown with the LTTE, the final act in a war that began in earnest in 1983 and is now Asia's longest-running.

Slowing the offensive is the presence of tens of thousands of civilians there, the military said. Witnesses who have escaped have said the Tigers were shooting people who tried to flee and making others stay and fight.

The military says there are no more than 70,000 people inside the sliver of a war zone that is left, while aid agencies estimate it to be around 200,000.

Among those people are the commanders of the LTTE, the military says. The group is on U.S., E.U., Canadian and Indian terrorism lists for their widespread use of the suicide bomb to kill enemies, politicians and civilians alike.

Meanwhile, the military said police in the eastern port of Trincomalee said they had recovered an SAM-14 surface-to-air missile suspected to have been hidden by the LTTE.

Despite having an arsenal impressive even by formal military standards, that particular weapon has been noticeably missing from the battlefield amid repeated air force helicopter strikes that have helped propel the swift offensive.

The LTTE said on Monday it would accept a ceasefire, but not surrender and urged the international community to try and secure the former. The government has said the Tigers must surrender or be destroyed.

The LTTE say they are fighting to establish a separate state for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority, which complains of decades of mistreatment by successive governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic majority since independence from Britain in 1948. (Additional reporting and writing by Bryson Hull; Editing by Sugita Katyal)

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