World Of Sports

The TV grabs of the assailants who attacked the bus carrying Sri Lankan cricketers seemed familiar—AK-47 wielding attackers carrying haversacks—and almost a flashback to the Mumbai terror attacks of 26/11. Was it possible that these could have been an attack by militant elements in Pakistan close to the Tigers who are now virtually corralled in a 58 square km enclave in north-eastern Sri Lanka?

“While it is too early to assess as to who might have been responsible for the attack and why, one has to recall past instances of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) contacts with the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM),” says B. Raman, former head of the R&AW’s counter-terrorism wing.

The HUM was known before 1997 as the Harkat-ul-Ansar and a member of  the International Islamic Front (IIF) of Al Qaeda. The LTTE is believed to have provided its freighters of the ‘Sea Pigeons’ in the 1990s to facilitate heroin smuggling from the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.

In fact Raman’s 2007 book ‘The Kaoboys of R&AW’ was the first to minutely detail the linkages between the LTTE and the HUM. The LTTE freighter ‘MV Ahat’ which was loaded with weapons by the ISI and HUM was tracked by the R&AW through electronic intercepts which were passed on to the Coast Guard. The vessel was intercepted and boarded by the Navy and Coast Guard in 1993 and Kittu, the LTTE’s second-in-command, chose to go down with the ship rather than surrender.

“Against this background, a possible line of enquiry should be whether the HUM or any of its allies in the IIF is repaying a debt to the LTTE for its past assistance by attacking the Sri Lankan cricket team,” Raman says.

The entire top leadership of the LTTE including Prabhakaran, intelligence chief Pottu Amman and Sea Tigers chief Soosai are confined with the remaining LTTE cadres to a 58 square km enclave north of their last bastion, the coastal town of Puthukuddiyirippu. This enclave is fast shrinking and recent intercepts by the Lankan authorities point to a desperate LTTE leadership with the Lankan authorities rejecting calls for a ceasefire.