Senior DMK leader T R Baalu has claimed that he does not own any fishing trawler and the two trawlers owned by M/s Meenan Fisheries Limited, the company in which his two sons are directors, are “lying idle for nearly one year at Kasimedu fishing harbour in Chennai”.
Responding to a Colombo datelined story, ‘Seized trawlers of fishers belong to Baalu?’ carried in these columns on February 23, Baalu’s advocate, R U Dineshrajkumar, issued a notice to the newspaper, saying: “time and again the Sri Lankan Coast Guard were behaving ruthlessly with the innocent Indian fishermen who go for fishing using fishing boats and the Government of India as well as the Government of Tamil Nadu have been intervening on all these occasions and taking necessary action through the external affairs ministry. However, dragging my client into the said issue by falsely propagating that my client is owning trawlers in large numbers and the fishermen were forced to intrude into Sri Lankan waters are nothing but imaginary besides false, baseless and misleading.”
Our Colombo correspondent P K Balachandran, however, said that he was only quoting Rev Fr Ananda Kumar, the parish priest of Maadakal, who had met the Tamil Nadu fishermen arrested in Sri Lanka.
Even in the published report, no categorical statement was made on Baalu owning trawlers and the headline too had a question mark.
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