Vaiko misled Prabhakaran: KP

Even three days before his death and the decimation of LTTE, Tiger chief Velupillai Prabhakaran was counting on a favourable result in the 2009 elections to the Lok Sabha in Tamil Nadu to save him from the ignominy of surrender to the Sri Lankan army and an involuntary asylum in a foreign land.

Revealing this in an interview to Daily Mirror on Saturday, the then head of the International Secretariat of the LTTE, Kumaran Pathmanathan (KP), said: “Tamil Nadu fellows like Vaiko and Nedumaran had given false hopes of a change in the situation (in India) after elections in mid-May, saying that the BJP will win overall and Jayalalithaa in TN.” Prabhakaran pinned his faith on Tamil Nadu and India because he did not trust the West, including the official peace broker, Norway, KP recalled in the interview.

He said that over the end of 2008 and early 2009, the international community and the co-chairs of the Tokyo peace conference, had devised a plan whereby the LTTE would lay down arms, hand over armouries to UN and negotiate a peace settlement with Colombo.

As part of the deal, Colombo would allow the top rung of the LTTE to be shifted to an Asian or African country; try the middle rung leaders but award them light sentences; and give amnesty to ordinary LTTE cadre. The US was ready to send a fleet to evacuate Prabhakaran and his colleagues. In the bargain, 3,00,000 Tamil civilians caught in the crossfire would also be saved.

But Prabhakaran, who did not want to go down in history as having compromised and surrendered, sent word to KP that if any foreign ship appeared on the Mullaitivu coast for rescuing him, it would be fired at.