By M.R. Narayan Swamy, IANS
New Delhi : The reported arrest of the man who ran the highly secretive global arms procurement wing of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers for over two decades is a serious blow to the insurgent group, Indian officials say.
Tharmalingam Shanmughan alias Kumaran Pathmanathan alias KP has also been linked to the explosives that were used to assassinate former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991 in Tamil Nadu, according to these officials.
KP, as he is widely known, was reportedly arrested from Bangkok Monday evening. The reports added that KP, who often toured the world on the strength of the numerous passports he held, had obtained Thai citizenship.
A senior Indian official told IANS that Indian authorities were aware of the reported arrest. “It is true and it is a body blow to the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). It could cut off LTTE’s arms supply lines.”
Another official added: “It is a big blow. He was one of their key persons. His arrest will only add to the LTTE’s cup of woes.”
According to the officials, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which probed Gandhi’s assassination, linked the 2.4 mm Singapore Fragmentation Grenade (SFG) pellets in the suicide belt used to kill him to a lot smuggled by KP’s department.
Also linked to KP, according to the CBI, was a 9 mm pistol that Sivarasan, the LTTE operative who oversaw Gandhi’s killing, used to commit suicide near Bangalore to avoid capture. “To that extent we had wanted to question him. He is a suspect in the case.”
According to the officials, KP – who had no direct involvement in Gandhi’s assassination – was suspected of passing a wireless message to a Sri Lankan Tamil man in Tamil Nadu in September 1990 warning of a possible attack on “the Indian leadership”.
Belonging to Myliddy in Jaffna, KP has stayed one step ahead of all his pursuers ever since the responsibility of putting in place a solid global network of arms supply was entrusted to him in the early 1980s.
KP was a roaring success by everyone’s reckoning, and the LTTE had slowly and steadily built up an infrastructure spread over several countries that kept the group supplied with sophisticated arms and ammunition even in the worst of circumstances.
Within years, the LTTE began operating a shipping fleet that reportedly carried both legal and illegal contraband.
According to Peter Chalk, an expert on terrorism, KP held a variety of bank accounts in Britain, Germany, Denmark, Greece and Australia and his main operational bases were located in Singapore, Myanmar, Thailand and, in later years, South Africa.
Over time, the LTTE’s global weapons procurement team came to be known as the “KP department”.
According to Chalk, KP and his men got “no formal military training… However (they) received intensive instructions in a number of other areas including document forgery, gun running, communications, international freight shipping and investing”.
According to Indian officials, KP lived in India for a while in the 1980s, during which time he reportedly turned a farmhouse at Vellore in Tamil Nadu into a secure hideout and befriended a shipping magnate and his wife in Mumbai.
One official said that KP’s arrest could turn out to be the biggest loss to the LTTE since the 2004 defection of Karuna, who was at that time the Tigers’ special commander of Sri Lanka’s eastern province.