CBI probes Tiger links in India

India’s premier investigations agency the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is grilling six key LTTE suspects who were arrested by the Indian police in a sweeping crackdown last month. A CBI official told The Sunday Times that they were interrogating the suspects to ascertain their mission in India and whether they had any involvement in the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.

The official said they had gathered details about various transit points used by the LTTE to smuggle arms and essential items from India to Sri Lanka. He said the CBI had obtained vital information about various enterprises which were LTTE fronts and the LTTE’s ties with various India terror groups such as the Maoists and Nagaland rebels.

“We have frozen the bank accounts of the suspects. They have also given us names of Indian citizens who have been aiding the LTTE,” the official said adding that they had arrested three Indian nationals from Tamil Nadu who are believed to be their accomplices.

He said other accomplices had either gone underground or fled the country.“We have reason to believe that these LTTE operatives are getting the assistance of Indian nationals who might have been previously in some way connected to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi even though we have not found any link as yet,” he said.

The six suspects are identified as Bala Reuben from Vavuniya Nalla Thambi Jayasheelan from Jaffna, Selva Kumaran from Batticaloa, Prasad Sellasamy from Jaffna, Raj Shankar from Jaffna and the LTTE Tamil Nadu intelligence wing chief Thambidurai Parameswaran, also known as Suruli.

The arrest of the LTTE Tamil Nadu intelligence chief was a major blow to the group’s operations in India. Parameswaran, who was among eight men arrested in the night of June 16 at an LTTE safe house in a suburb of Chennai, was working under Sanjeev Master, an LTTE intelligence wing leader who is said to be operating in Sri Lanka’s rebel controlled area.

Parameswaran had confessed to the CBI that he had been involved in recruiting and training displaced Sri Lankan Tamils who have taken refuge on the Indian coast of Rameswaran. He has also told the detective the locations of the safe houses, weapons transit points and training camps in Tamil Nadu.

Parameswaran is said to be the LTTE link between the Indian rebel groups and the LTTE in which they had been assisting the LTTE to smuggle arms and ammunition into Sri Lanka. Parameswaran has confessed to the CBI detectives that he had mainly smuggled fuel and material to make explosives to Sri Lanka by getting the assistance of Indian rebel groups.

He had also confessed that he received money which was deposited in many offshore bank accounts in order to trade with the Maoist rebels to purchase fuel, ball bearings and plastic explosives. On January 6, the Karnataka police arrested two other LTTE intelligence operatives, Bala Reuben (22) and Nalla Tambi Jayasheelan (25) allegedly over a fake credit card racket. The arrests were made after a tip-off by State intelligence authorities on men using fake credit cards to purchase jewellery in Mangalore which is a town in Karnataka state.

The two LTTE operatives who are now held by the CBI have told the detectives on interrogation that they were working for a person identified as ‘Chennai Kumar’, who is believed to be connected to the LTTE, and were only tasked with buying jewellery in India with the fake credit cards. They claimed to have received very small commissions and said they did not know what Kumar did with the jewellery. The police, however, suspect an LTTE fundraising racket.

Gold worth Indian Rs. 300,000, 11 fake credit cards created with stolen identities of non-resident Indians and one fake passport created in Chennai were seized following the arrests. The detectives have traced the gold to have been purchased from jewellery stores in Bangalore and Mangalore. Incidentally, the two have also told interrogators that Kumar may be known to the Bangalore police as Srigandhapal, a resident of Trichy, who was arrested in the city in June 2007 with two others in a similar fake credit card case.

It is reported that Srigandhapal alias Chennai Kumar subsequently escaped from prison and had gone into hiding. It has also been revealed that in June 2007 in arrests made by the Bangalore police, 120 fake credit cards of 35 banks had been seized from Srigandhapal, an engineer Sai Prasad from Chennai and a film financier Nagaraj. What was more intriguing was that the three claimed to have got data for the fake cards from the United States. The January 6 arrests in Karnataka were followed by subsequent arrests of seven LTTE operatives from Madurai by the Q branch of the Tamil Nadu Police on January 8.

The Q branch has seized in the January 8 raid, nearly 5,000 detonators said to be smuggled to Sri Lanka, and Indian Rs 150,000 given to a Sri Lankan refugee for alleged purchase of explosives.