Three alleged “LTTE leaders,” are reportedly killed as they were trying to “revive” afresh the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam campaign in Northern Sri Lanka. They are identified as Kajeepan Ponnaiah Selvanayagam, alias Gopi, Sundaralingam Kajeepan, alias Thevihan, and Navaratnam Navaneethan, alias Appan.
Defence spokesman Brigadier Ruwan Wanigasooriya told the media in Colombo yesterday that Gopi was killed in overnight skirmishes in the jungle near Nedunkerni in the northern Vavuniya district.
Gopi, he said, was the leader of an attempt to “revive the LTTE within the pro-Tiger Tamil diaspora.”
According to official statements, the men were in a house and were shot dead when they tried to escape. The entire story smacks of a staged encounter and is riddled with contradictions. Because earlier, a defence spokesman said a Sri Lankan soldier had been killed but later “corrected” this, to say that he had lost his life in preparatory exercises before the operation.
The Jaffna-based Uthayan reported that Gopi had been in military custody. The defence ministry released photos showing dozens of soldiers after the operation, but no photographs of the three Tamils were published.
Gopi’s body was identified at the Anuradhapura hospital by his father-in-law S. Balakurubaran, detained mother S. Rasamalar, and wife Sarmila.
Balakurubaran told the BBC’s Tamil service that Gopi’s body had gunshot wounds under the chest and lower stomach. Gopi worked in Saudi Arabia for three years following his marriage. “Since January there have been no communications with him. Now I’ve seen him as a dead body,” he said.
Brigadier Wanigasooriya claimed that an “attempted resurgence of terrorism” had emerged “in the general area of Pallai in the Jaffna Peninsula,” with information “surfacing” about “several key suspects leading the campaign.”
According to him, a local group was “functioning under the instructions of LTTE leaders Nediyawan and Vinayagam, based in Europe and preparing the ground for another armed campaign.” He alleged that those killed had participated in LTTE activities before the separatist organisation was militarily liquidated in 2009.
Citing this “evidence”, Mahinda Samarasinghe, Sri Lanka’s Minister for Plantations and Special Envoy on human rights, justified presence of the military in the north. Colombo had been criticised for the presence of the military in the north and has been asked to “scale down” its operations by US and its allies at the the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. But the increasing military presence is based on our assessment of national security needs, the minister insisted, and the latest incident provided “clear evidence of that.”
Samarasinghe was referring to the US-sponsored resolution passed last month by the UNHRC. It asked the Office of Human Rights Commissioner to investigate human rights violations, including war crimes, committed during the military offensive against the LTTE.
On Monday, a group, suspected to be from military intelligence, assaulted Sivagnanam Selvatheepan, a journalist for the Jaffna-based Yarl Thinakk Ural, Valampuri and the Colombo-based Tamil daily Veerakesari. Selvatheepan was viciously attacked after being followed by four masked men on motorbikes on Jaffna’s Point Pedro road. The journalist is in hospital with head injuries and a broken leg.
Thousands of youth detained as LTTE suspects and released after “rehabilitation” are said to be targetted n particular. No surprise therefore in the war devastated Vanni area in particular people have come to think that they are backto the wartime again.
— Poreg desk with in puts from various sources
