COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, May 14 (UPI) -- Sri Lankan police have uncovered thousands of pounds of C-4 explosive in what is believed to the largest find of weapons since the end of the island nation's civil war in 2009.
Police and security forces acted on a tip off from a member of the public and found nearly 14,000 pounds of C-4 in the small farming town of Puthukudiyiruppu near the coast in Mullaitivu District, a report in the Sri Lankan Times newspaper said.
The C-4 was sorted into packets of 110 and 55 pounds, the report said.
Also among the haul of weapons were 127 rocket-propelled grenades, 40 hand grenades, 123 anti-personnel mines, six claymore mines, six torpedo bombs, seven sulfur bottles and seven gas masks.
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Mullaitivu District -- within the majority Tamil area -- is one of 25 Sri Lankan administrative districts and is the second most northerly one. It was under the control of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, often called the Tamil Tigers, for most of the war which lasted around 25 years.
Few other details were reported by the Times.
But a report by the BBC said one defense analyst was skeptical, asking how such a large amount of weaponry could have remained undetected for so long. Another analyst said he believed the report was true because it was found buried nearly 20 feet in the ground, a tactic of guerrilla groups, the BBC said.
C-4 is often referred to as a plastic explosive because of its modeling clay texture that allows it to be molded around objects and fitted into cracks in buildings and vehicles
C-4 has been popular with guerrilla groups because its natural state is stable, which allows it to be carried long distance over rough terrain. To explode it requires a shock such as that of a detonator cap.
The protracted civil war between the majority Sinhalese federal army and the Tamil rebels ended in 2009.
The United Nations estimates around 100,000 people were killed, including up to 7,000 in the final, particularly brutal, year of fighting the Tamil Tigers.
The Tigers were struggling for a separate homeland for Tamils in the northeast of the island nation, which lies several miles off the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent.
A legacy of the war is a preponderance of land mines, mostly in the northern Tamil areas, that aid agencies and the federal government of Sri Lanka have been clearing.
When the government's National Mine Action Center was set up in 2010, it estimated that around 1,740 square miles in the north were suspected of having land mines.
However, clearance could take more than a decade, the Mine Action Project of the U.N. Development Program in Sri Lanka said in February.
At the end of last year, the Action Project said around 48 square miles of land remained to be cleared in the island's north.
The largest remaining area is nearly 13 square miles in Mannar District, followed by Mullaitivu District with around 11 square miles.
