Colombo: Over 300 former Tamil Tiger rebels, currently under rehabilitation, will sit for an examination that would prepare them for higher education in the universities, the government said on Monday.

Brigadier Sudantha Ranasinghe, commissioner general of rehabilitation, said 378 ex-LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam) cadres would sit for the General Certificates of Advanced Level Examination from Aug 9 to Sep 3, Xinhua reported.

"We identified 594 former LTTE cadres as students at the government-run rehabilitation camps last year," Ranasinghe said.

Ranasinghe said the LTTE forcibly recruited these students and they sacrificed their education to fulfill the needs of the organization.

The military runs a special school for these students with the assistance of the education ministry.

Ranasinghe said the military has identified 11,800 ex-LTTE cadres for rehabilitation from the refugee camps at the end of the civil war in 2009.

The LTTE had been fighting for a separate Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka's Northern and Eastern provinces for three decades before being defeated by the government troops in May 2009. IANS