On the hunt for Tamil Tigers’ new leader – the star

Sri Lanka’s government spent much of the past quarter-century on the hunt for Velupillai Prabhakaran, the short, stocky leader of the Tamil Tigers whose death last month seemed to herald an end to the island country’s on-again, off-again civil war.

Yet weeks after his shattered corpse was shown on TV, Sri Lankan authorities remain on the prowl, searching for Prabhakaran’s shadowy successor, a man of whom there are few photographs and who has been on Interpol’s most wanted list.

His name: Kumaran Pathmanathan.

The Sri Lankan government is pressing Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Laos to help find Pathmanathan, a long-time weapons buyer for the Tigers who has become Prabhakaran’s anointed successor. Indian police believe Pathmanathan was behind the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

Known within Tamil circles as KP, Pathmanathan seems to travel internationally with ease, thanks to numerous identities – authorities say he has used as many as 23 aliases – and, since no one really knows what he looks like, it has not been a problem.

Canadian police say the Tigers continue to raise funds in the GTA, Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona told the Star.

Fundraisers for the Tigers go door to door, pressuring residents to donate to their cause, and have also started extorting low-income workers such as strawberry pickers, Kohona said.

In all, the 54-year-old Pathmanathan is believed to control cash and assets worth between $1 billion and $5 billion (U.S.), Kohona said.

"If he’s smart, he’ll go retire on a beach somewhere," Kohona said in a phone interview from Colombo.

But he is unlikely to take the easy way out.

While Prabhakaran was the public face of the Tigers for decades, building a reputation for ruthlessness, Pathmanathan was the one who helped made Prabhakaran’s grisly accomplishments possible.

Born and raised in Jaffna, Pathmanathan, 54, purportedly joined the Tigers in his twenties before leaving the country in 1983.

As the head of the organization’s international fundraising and weapons procurement, Pathmanathan, who speaks fluent English, French, Tamil and Sinhalese, has orchestrated the purchase of surface-to-air missiles from Cambodia, assault rifles from Afghanistan, mortar shells from Yugoslavia, and tons of explosives from Ukraine.

It’s unclear whether Pathmanathan is trying to rekindle and re-arm militants in Sri Lanka.

In an emailed audio file circulating in the Tamil community, he says, "The struggle of the people of Tamil Eelam has reached a new stage. It is time now for us to move forward with our political vision towards our freedom."

He didn’t say in his message whether the Tigers would renounce violence. The Sri Lankan government isn’t taking the chance that they won’t.

Even with the war officially over, the military wants to add a further 100,000 recruits to the 200,000-strong army just to make it as difficult as possible for the Tigers to re-emerge.

Earlier this month, a shipload of relief supplies sent by members of the Tamil diaspora who were suspected of being Tiger sympathizers, was refused, even though the defence ministry admitted the donors had no "dangerous" intentions.

On June 18, Sri Lankan police arrested three Tiger cadres who allegedly were plotting to assassinate President Mahindra Rajapaksa.

Sri Lankan officials have spent weeks scouring laptop computers and documents found in Tiger bunkers, using the intelligence to target the terrorist group’s overseas efforts.

Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said the Tigers would likely shift their attention to international lobbying in coming months.

"The Tigers’ base of operations in Sri Lanka is dismantled and disabled," Gunaratna said. "But their global network is still powerful."

In Washington, Tamil expats have formed lobby groups such as Americans for Peace in Sri Lanka and Tamils for Justice, whose efforts to curry favour with the U.S. government is led by Bruce Fein, a former lawyer in the Reagan administration.

[Full Coverage]

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