By Ranga Sirilal

COLOMBO, Sept 5 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan troops killed at least 34 separatist Tamil Tiger guerrillas in the latest phase of an advance into rebel-held turf that has produced some of the bloodiest fighting in a decade, the military said on Friday. After seizing a string of strategic points from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in the last two weeks, the army is facing stiff resistance pushing toward the defacto rebel capital of Kilinochchi -- a symbolic target.

"Troops killed 30 LTTE terrorists and wounded 24 others in Thursday's fighting," a military spokesman who did not give his name in line with policy. He said five soldiers also died and 14 were wounded in the same fighting.

The military later said it had recovered four additional rebel bodies.

The rebels were not immediately available to comment on the battlefield casualties. But the pro-rebel website www.tamilnet.com quoted unnamed Tiger officials as saying they had repulsed an army advance and killed at least one soldier.

The LTTE also accused the army of firing artillery shells into a civilian area in Kilinochchi and destroying a store.

"The Sri Lanka military, it appears, is ever-ready to treat all stock belonging to Tamils as a threat and does not hesitate to destroy (it)," the LTTE statement said.

The military dismissed the claim.

"Our target is very clear -- the forward defence line of the LTTE," military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara said. "We know exactly where the civilians were kept by the LTTE. We don't fire at them."

Both sides regularly accuse the other of disregard for civilian casualties, and rights groups say both are responsible for murders and abductions in the 25-year-old war.

The fighting is taking place along a frontline that curves south along roughly 100 km (64 miles) of mostly thick jungle, from the western port of Nachikudah to near just south of the rebel-held Mullaitivu port on the eastern shore.

There, the guerrillas are dug into trenches and bunkers behind booby-trapped and mined defence lines, which the army is hitting with artillery, air strikes and ground troops in the north of the Indian Ocean island nation.

The rebels since 1983 have fought to establish a separate nation for the ethnic minority Tamil people in a civil war that has killed 70,000 people and is one of Asia's longest-running.

The government, led by the Sinhalese majority ethnic group, has vowed to beat the LTTE by year's end after officially scrapping a truce in January that both sides had mostly ignored. (Writing by Bryson Hull; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

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