The bodies of 11 men and four women all wearing Action Against Hunger (ACF) T-shirts were found face down in their office in Muttur, Jeevan Thiagarajah, the head of the main umbrella group for aid agencies in the country, said.

"We don't know how they died or even when it happened," Thiagarajah, from the Consortium for Humanitarian Agencies (CHA), told AFP. "Our staff drove to Muttur this morning and they found the bodies."

The rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had on Saturday accused the security forces of killing the aid workers, who were all members of Sri Lanka's minority ethnic Tamil community.

Heavy fighting broke out in Muttur and the surrounding northeastern district of Trincomalee last month after the government accused rebels of blocking a sluice gate that provided water to civilians.

The fighting had prevented aid agencies from accessing the Muttur area until Sunday and the CHA statement was the first confirmation that the aid workers had been killed.

French diplomats in Colombo ruled out the possibility of any of their nationals being among the dead, saying there were no French aid workers in the Trincomalee area.

ACF is one of the hundreds of aid agencies that set up operations in Sri Lanka after an Indian Ocean tsunami wiped out much the island's coastal infrastructure and killed an estimated 31,000 people in December 2004.

There was no immediate word from the government about what happened to the aid workers in Muttur after fighting intensified there last Wednesday.

However, the military said it had established full control over the Muslim-majority town over the weekend.

Reporters and photographers who tried to enter Muttur Sunday were turned away by security forces although the military took a group of journalists on a conducted tour under tight security on Saturday evening.

Troops said the guerrillas had shelled the town on Sunday morning.

The fighting erupted on July 26 when war planes bombed suspected Tiger positions in a bid to force the rebels to lift their blockade of an irrigation canal that was denying water to some 15,000 farming families downstream.

Heavy fighting since has claimed the lives of at least 425 people by official count. The military has also accused the Tiger rebels of massacring 100 Muslim residents, a charge denied by the guerrillas.

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