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Defence Minister Thilak Marapana yesterday directed the three Forces Commanders to conduct an inquiry to investigate as to how the information about the mystery ship secretly leaked to outsiders foiling the operation conducted by the Navy and Air Force.

The Minister has also directed the three Forces commanders to investigate the reasons behind leaking these secret information to outsiders and to take precautionary action to stop such instances in future.

Minister Marapana made these directives to the three Forces Commanders as a combine operation by the Navy and the Air Force was foiled on Thursday to detect an unidentified ship sailing 200 nautical miles off Sri Lankan territorial waters.

The operation was conducted on information given by a friendly country to the Sri Lankan government.

The ship had fled from the scene as the information regarding this operation has leaked to them minutes after the operation was launched.

It has also been confirmed that information regarding the number of aircraft, naval vessels and the number of soldiers deployed for this operation had been leaked to this ship, beforehand.

The Minister has questioned the three Forces Commanders as to how the LTTE is conducting secret missions without leaking information to outsiders while all information regarding secret operations by government Forces are leaked to outsiders.

All efforts made by Army Commander Lt. General Lional Balagalle at the last moment to stop communicating information through electronic media was futile as information had already been communicated to the ship by that time.

Suspicion has also arisen why such an unusual attention was focused on this operation as Naval operations of this nature was common knowledge to all.

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