By IANS,
Colombo : Sri Lanka Friday expressed the hope that the request to India by Tamil Tigers chief Velupillai Prabhakaran to lift the ban on his group would not be entertained by New Delhi.
“Prabhakaran’s overtures to India contained in his latest message will not find accommodation,” Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama told parliament, while referring to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
He condemned the mayhem in Mumbai and underlined “the urgent need for concerted action by all countries to eradicate terrorism”.
Making his annual speech Thursday, Prabhakaran, who turned 54 Wednesday, urged India to revoke the ban on his group and said the Tamil people hoped that “the Indian superpower will take a positive stand on our national question”.
Sending an olive branch to India, the first country to outlaw the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Prabhakaran said his outfit never viewed India “as an enemy”.
The LTTE was banned in India in 1992, a year after a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber assassinated former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Recalling the assassination of “one of India’s greatest sons and an outstanding prime minister”, Bogollagama said that Gandhi “had to pay the supreme sacrifice for his unshakable stand on supporting Sri Lanka’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and his outright rejection of the LTTE’s separatist and fascist agenda”.