Political Leader of Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers Killed in an Airstrike

By Somini Sengupta
November 3, 2007
New York Times

NEW DELHI — The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan separatist group known for suicide attacks on political and military targets, lost their most prominent international representative on Friday when the head of their political wing was killed in an airstrike by the Sri Lankan military, according to the guerrilla group.

The Tamil Tigers announced the death of the leader, S. P. Tamilselvan, along with those of five associates, in a news release issued early in the afternoon Sri Lanka time. The Sri Lankan military said he had been killed in air force strikes on an area called Thirivearu, near the rebel garrison of Kilinochchi, where the military said senior rebel leaders had gathered for a meeting. There was no independent verification available of exactly when he was killed, or where.

The killing further ratcheted up the stakes in Sri Lanka’s renewed quarter-century-long ethnic conflict between the majority ethnic Sinhalese-dominated government and the rebels, also known as the L.T.T.E. For more than a year, a series of open military attacks and counterattacks, suicide bombings and mysterious abductions has left no pretense that a 2002 cease-fire agreement, which Mr. Tamilselvan had helped draft, still holds.

The executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Policy Alternatives, Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, said by telephone from the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, that the assassination demonstrated the government’s “determined intent to prosecute a war and defeat the L.T.T.E.,” and so would vindicate the hard-liners on the rebel side.

“They are now the mirror image of each other in every respect,” he said of the two sides. Mr. Tamilselvan was killed barely a week after a so-called Black Tiger suicide squad penetrated a military base in the central Sri Lankan city of Anuradhapura, killing 13 soldiers.

Mr. Tamilselvan was the highest ranking Tamil Tiger official authorized to meet with foreign journalists and diplomats until the Sri Lankan government effectively blocked foreigners from crossing from government- to rebel-held territory last year.

Sri Lankan state-run television news blamed Mr. Tamilselvan’s leadership for a string of attacks on Sri Lankan leaders, including former presidents and military officials. His death leaves the organization with no internationally known figure beyond its elusive leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Mr. Tamilselvan had also become chief negotiator for the rebel side since the group’s self-described ideologue, Anton S. Balasingham, fell ill and then died of cancer last December.

Also on Friday, British authorities arrested Karuna Amman, a breakaway rebel leader from Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels who split from the main movement in 2004, taking an estimated 6,000 fighters with him, Reuters reported.

After four years of a lull, heavy fighting began in July 2006 with a battle for the country’s multiethnic east. Tamil Tigers set off land mines and sent suicide bombers, killing suspected political rivals and forcibly recruiting ethnic Tamils into its ranks, including children.