Free Republic

Among the familiar hucksters who sought to capitalize on the troubles in Ferguson, Missouri, came a new face: Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights and self-styled heir to the non-existent royal houses of Iraq and Syria. “I am deeply concerned,” Prince Zeid said in a press release, about “institutionalized discrimination” in America, and “I urge the U.S. authorities” to conduct “in-depth examinations” of racial justice. Notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that Michael Brown’s death resulted from the criminal acts he engaged in before and during his encounter with officer Darren Wilson, Zeid’s Human Rights Council...

HYDERABAD: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels were frequent visitors to Andhra Pradesh prior to 1996 and they even trained the Maoists on guerrilla warfare, highly-placed sources in the police department have revealed to TOI. Expert fighters from the LTTE reportedly visited a camp held in the Nallamala forests in November 1996 to train Maoists. Though it was their last visit to the state, the sources said that since then the LTTE and CPI (Maoist) have developed a friendship that continues even today. They continue to share ideas, tactics and even literature. However, they have stopped exchanging weapons...

The terrorists who attacked Mumbai had come from the sea. This serves as a reminder to us that the LTTE has in years past tried to penetrate our harbours and Colombo has always been a target. (...) Whenever there was military action against the LTTE by the Sri Lankan forces, LTTE had two cards to play. First relates to violation of human rights by the armed forces, which resonates well with the West. That also helps LTTE immensely as foreign governments tend to make their bilateral assistance to Sri Lanka conditional to good governance by GSOL. The second was the...

Could there be a link between Norway-based LTTE operatives and Anders Behring Breivik, who bombed the Norwegian government headquarters in Oslo and wiped out a youth group on a nearby island on July 22 killing over 80 civilians? Responding to a query by The Island, informed sources said that the Norwegian could have had a link with the LTTEactivists in Norway. Breivik, in his 1,518 manifesto, which was released hours before he carried out the massacre, said had felt that Europe should follow the LTTE example of expelling the Muslims from Sri Lanka. He had interpreted the expulsion of Muslims...

People in Sri Lanka's war-ravaged north casted an overwhelming majority of their votes to the candidates of the major Tamil party at the local government elections held on Saturday, the Colombo Page reported on Sunday. Despite the massive campaign launched by the ruling party United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) in the Northern districts where elections were held for the first time after 29 years, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), formerly controlled by the Tamil Tiger rebels, won 18 out of 26 councils. An estimated 60 percent of the 2.5 million eligible voters turned out to cast their ballots throughout the...

In May 2009, the army of the South Asian island nation of Sri Lanka did what decades of UN diplomatic intervention and State Department pronouncements could not do. It ended its 26-year war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, more commonly known as the Tamil Tigers. The war not only extracted a tremendous economic cost, but had a massive human cost—the UN estimated that the death toll might exceed 100,000. In the end, Sri Lankan action was both merciless and effective. The army reconquered Tamil Tiger-held territory and slaughtered the group's leadership. The final battle was messy, but with...

BANGKOK: Two Pakistanis and a Thai woman arrested on suspicion of making fake passports for al Qaeda linked groups were part of criminal networks tied to “many terrorist attacks”, Thai police said Thursday. The arrests in Thailand formed part of an international operation to stamp out a huge cell that has been linked to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai and the Madrid train bombings in 2004. Pakistanis Muhammad Athar Butt, 39, and Zeeshan Ehsan Butt, 29, and Thai national Sirikanlaya Kijbumrung, 25, were arrested in Thailand on Tuesday as they attempted to flee into Laos. “They are suspected of being...

NOTE The following text is a quote: Singapore Man Convicted of Conspiracy to Provide Material Support to a Foreign Terrorist Organization Aided Tamil Tiger Terrorists in the Attempted Purchase of Grenade Launchers, Sniper Rifles, Machine Guns and other State of the Art Firearms BALTIMORE—A federal jury today convicted Balraj Naidu, 48, a citizen of the Republic of Singapore, of conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, the Justice Department announced. According to evidence presented at his five day trial, beginning in February 2006, Naidu and his co-conspirators attempted to purchase state of the art weaponry from China,...

VANCOUVER (Reuters) - Canadian authorities unloaded a cramped cargo ship on Friday of nearly 500 Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka whose arrival has sparked a national debate over the country's immigration and refugee laws. The sun was just rising on Pacific Coast when MV Sun Sea sailed under escort into a Canadian Navy base near Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island, and docked next to a makeshift camp set up to process the men, women and children on board. Officials said the ship was in good condition, but they would not describe the accommodations of the estimated 490 people...

The International Monetary Fund said Wednesday that it has sold 10 metric tons of gold to Sri Lanka, the third customer to acquire a portion of its gold holdings. The IMF in September finalized a plan to sell 403.3 metric tons of gold—an amount equivalent to about one-eighth of its total holdings. The IMF previously announced the sales of 200 metric tons of gold to India and 2 metric tons to Mauritius.

LTTE arms moved overland from China to NK for almost a decade by Shamindra Ferdinando Chinese arms consignments for the LTTE had been moved overland to North Korea across the China-North Korea border before being transferred to the terrorist group’s ‘floating’ warehouses on the high seas close to Indonesia, for about a decade, The Island learns. The LTTE had obtained its first Chinese arms consignment way back in 1994/1995 during the then People’s Alliance (PA) administration. On-going inquiries, well informed sources said, revealed that the China-North Korea overland transport of arms for the LTTE had operated for almost a decade...

OCTOBER 17, 2009 Rajaratnam Surfaced in U.S. Terrorism Probe By EVAN PEREZ and MATTHEW ROSENBERG WASHINGTON—The hedge-fund billionaire charged as part of a vast insider-trading case surfaced in an earlier, separate probe into U.S. fundraising by a Sri Lankan terrorist group, people familiar with the probe said. As part of that investigation, federal agents said they uncovered documents showing that Raj Rajaratnam, founder of the Galleon Group, was among several wealthy Sri Lankans in the U.S. whose donations to a Maryland-based charity made their way to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, according to people familiar with the probe. Raj...

"Face -to-face with a human bomb A Sri Lankan journalist tries to find out why a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber would want to blow himself up" SNIPPET: "Earlier this year, I found myself seated face-to-face with a would-be suicide bomber, the most dreaded weapon in the arsenal of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) -- better known as the Tamil Tigers. Until their battlefield defeat earlier this year, the LTTE dreamed that their long campaign of terrorism would help them carve an independent Tamil homeland out of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. As we talked, I felt comfortable in...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka's defeated Tamil Tiger rebels have named a man accused of running a vast arms smuggling operation as their new leader, two months after government forces crushed the separatist movement. The new leader has pledged to remake the insurgents into a nonviolent separatist movement. Selvarasa Pathmanathan was the rebels' chief of international relations and allegedly ran an international weapons smuggling ring. The Sri Lankan government has appealed to foreign governments to find and arrest him. Pathmanathan "will lead us into the next steps of our freedom struggle according to the vision of our esteemed leader,"...

NEW DELHI–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...

Bangkok, Thailand - Over two months after the bloody finale of Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, a lingering row over civilian casualties continues to roil a fractured society. Sri Lankan authorities have insisted that their final military push against Tamil Tiger rebels didn't target hundreds of thousands of civilians trapped behind enemy lines. But aid workers, church officials, and government doctors reported that heavy shelling had caused mass casualties. A preliminary United Nations report estimated that 7,000 had died between January and May. On Wednesday, however, a group of doctors who had provided dramatic firsthand accounts of civilian suffering in...

There are few places in the world Robert D. Kaplan has not visited and written about in his books and magazine articles. He travels to countries hardly anyone else even considers – to Turkmenistan, for instance, during the time of the lunatic "Turkmenbashi" who transformed his post-Soviet republic into the North Korea of Central Asia. He has an uncanny ability to see conflicts looming on the horizon well in advance and – reversing the standard relationship between journalists and officials – U.S. defense policy professionals often ask him for briefings about what he has seen.His regular dispatches in the...

The rebel group's international relations chief, Selvarasa Pathmanathan, said in a recorded message that the organisation would continue to pursue its aim of a separate Tamil state despite the rout of its army and death of its leadership. "The struggle of people of Tamil Eelam [the separate state the Tigers fought for] has reached a new state," he said. "It is time now for us to move forward with our political vision towards our freedom." A Sri Lankan protester sets fire to a Tamil Tiger flag AFP reported that Mr Pathmanathan, who is better known as K.P. and worked as...

... Mr. Rajapaksa, elected in 2005, finally put an end to the "peace process" with Prabhakaran and focused on winning the military fight. In 2007, with the help of a Tiger splinter group, the government subdued the Eastern Province; the first elections were held there last year. The fighting then moved to the North. It has not been cheap or easy. Military spending in the 2009 budget is $1.7 billion, 5% of GDP and 20% of the government's budget. ...

At different times Velupillai Prabhakaran’s admirers made absurd attempts to compare VP with George Washington, Mao Ze Dong and other great historical leaders. Many of his enemies however were calling this despicable gangster him another Hitler. But by doing so they gave this cowardly criminal undue recognition – even though in a negative sense. But VP is far more conceited than the Nazi dictator ever was. While the latter merely called himself the `Fuehrer’ (Leader), Prabhakaran has become the self-styled ‘Sooriyathevan’ (Sun God). So the despot who is closest to Velupillai P is not Hitler or any other dictator but...