COLOMBO: The Sri Lanka navy took into custody a Tamil Tigersponsored relief carrying vessel MV Captain Ali after it entered Sri Lankan waters illegally on Thursday, the Sri Lankan navy said in a statement on Friday.
The vessel, carrying cargo collected by the LTTE sympathisers in Europe, was intercepted by a naval patrol 160 km west of Colombo at 4 am on June 4, the Lankan navy said.
Among those on board at the time of the arrest was Kristjan Guomundsson, a former member of the Scandinavian-staffed Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) which oversaw the unproductive 2002-2008 ceasefire agreement between the Lankan Government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
MV Captain Ali had embarked on the journey to Sri Lanka, although Colombo had not given it the necessary clearance, a navy statement said.
However, the pro-Tiger Tamil Rehabilitation Organisation (TRO) maintained that the ship was arrested, at least 18 nautical miles off Colombo.
The TRO further said the mission was not one of the LTTE, as alleged by the Sri Lankan navy, but of the organisation called “Act Now” whose campaign director was Tim Martin. The programme to supply relief to the beleaguered Tamil civilians in the war-affected Wanni region of North Sri Lanka was supported by 31 British MPs, the TRO said.
The vessel, sailing under the Syrian flag, had a crew of 15, including an Iceland national, a British national, two Egyptians and 11 Syrian nationals. The captain was a Syrian national, the naval statement said.
According to the navy, the ship was chartered by “‘Mercy Mission to Wanni”, a fund raising campaign sponsored by ‘Act Now’, a pro-LTTE organisation.
The organisation collected funds and supplies in the UK last year, supposedly to distribute them among the Internally Displaced Tamil civilians in Wanni region.
