Ethnic Sinhalese flee Sri Lanka fighting.

Ethnic Sinhalese flee Sri Lanka fighting.

A daylong artillery exchange Saturday between Sri Lanka's military and Tamil Tiger guerrillas in the island's east drove thousands of Sinhalese from their villages, an official said.

Rebels said 30 soldiers died in the clashes; the military said only two troops had been killed. Both sides accused the other of causing civilian casualties.

Rebel spokesman Rasiah Ilanthirayan said the guerillas repulsed a military advance into their territory in eastern Trincomalee district.

"We retaliated and pushed them back to their original positions," he said.

It was impossible to reconcile the conflicting casualty figures, and the two sides are known to exaggerate the numbers of casualties they inflict.

Scores of ethnic Sinhalese civilians fled their homes in three villages and took shelter in Buddhist temples and schools, a local government official said.

At least 3,000 people took shelter in two Buddhist temples and two schools in Kantale village some 18 miles southwest of the town of Trincomalee, said Sirimevan Dharmasena, an official in Kantale.

Meanwhile, the Tigers in an e-mail statement claimed 15 ethnic Tamil refugees were killed in a village in Batticaloa district when artillery shells hit a school where they had taken shelter after fleeing earlier fighting.

An official at the government's security media center, who spoke on condition of anonymity citing policy, said he did not know if any refugees were hit.

Independent verification of the incident was not possible because reporters and aid workers are not allowed into the area.

The security official said however that three civilians and four soldiers in majority ethnic Sinhalese villages bordering the neighboring Trincomalee district were wounded by shells fired from rebel areas.

The Tigers have been fighting for more than 20 years for a separate homeland for the island nation's 3.1 million ethnic Tamil minority, citing decades of discrimination by the majority Sinhalese.

The government says it is willing to give autonomy to areas where Tamils are in the majority in the north and northeast, but the rebels want sweeping changes that the government says will infringe on the country's sovereignty.

Associated Press.