COLOMBO: Pottu Amman, the LTTE’s intelligence chief and one of the main accused in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, took cyanide and drowned himself in the Nanthikadal lagoon in Mullaitivu in the closing stages of the war, said Rohan Gunaratna, an internationally known Sri Lankan expert on terrorism.
“It is very likely that Pottu Amman committed suicide.
His wife certainly committed suicide. Although his body was not recovered, there is information that he took cyanide and drowned himself in the Nanthikadal lagoon,” Gunaratne told the state-owned Daily News on Saturday.
India had sought the death certificates of Prabhakaran and Pottu Amman so that the criminal case against them in India could be closed.
BATTLE STILL ON: Gunaratna, who is the head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said that though the LTTE had been decimated in Sri Lanka, it was very active overseas. Sri Lanka should launch a diplomatic offensive against it in the capitals of the world, he added.
Many important Western powers, who had tried to save the LTTE and its top leadership in the last stages of the battle in the guise of minimising loss of civilian lives, would have to be convinced to abandon their anti-Sri Lankan stand and dismantle the LTTE’s financial and political structures in their areas, he said.
KP SHIFTED TO MALAYSIA: According to the expert, Selvarasa Pathmanathan alias Kumaran Pathmanathan alias KP, the head of the LTTE’s international wing and a self-proclaimed leader of the organisation after Prabhakaran’s death in May, had shifted from Thailand to Malaysia.
“The State of Penang, is the key centre for LTTE operations.
Unless the Lankan government works closely with the Malaysian counterparts, the LTTE is likely to re-structure, re-organise and pose a threat to the country’s security in the coming months,” he said.
CONTINUED DETENTION OF REFUGEES: Justifying the Sri Lankan government’s continued detention of or the restrictions on the movement of the 280,000 Tamil refugees, Gunaratna said that at least 10 per cent of the displaced persons could be hardened and trained LTTE or pro-LTTE elements.