For Tiger critic, death came calling

Somini Sengupta

US: The killer asked for "Ketheshwaran." It was his full first name and one that he had not often heard since leaving the Tiger movement. For whatever reason, it made Ketheshwaran Loganathan, known lately as Kethesh, go quickly down the stairs and to the front gate of his house.

He had not even opened the gate when, through the grille, the assassin put a bullet through his head. He died quickly.

Loganathan, 54, was among the fiercest critics of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The group is widely blamed for his death on August 12, although it has neither accepted nor rejected the accusation.

Among the Tiger's favourite targets over the years are prominent Tamil intellectuals, especially those who ally themselves with the Government, as Loganathan had earlier this year when he became deputy Secretary General of a Government agency coordinating the Peace Process.

His killing came exactly a year after the assassination of former Foreign Minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, the highest-ranking ethnic Tamil in the Government.

Loganathan was unusual among the many detractors of the Tigers. He was a Tamil nationalist, deeply versed in the language and ideology of the Tiger cause, yet virulently opposed to its methods. He belonged to another militant group until the mid-1990s.

The Tigers systematically killed many of his colleagues.

Loganathan was unforgiving about the Tigers' human rights record. He was a strident critic of their fundamental claim that only the Tigers represented Tamil interests in Sri Lanka.

"He knew their thinking, he critiques them in their language," said Jehan Perera of the National Peace Council of Sri Lanka, a nonpartisan research and advocacy group. He described Loganathan's approach as "adversarial."

The day of his assassination, Loganathan was writing a response to an essay that Perera had written for an upcoming seminar on the peace process. He had spent the day working at home. He had told his wife, Bhawani Loganathan, that he would have to opt out of their Saturday habit of visiting a Hindu temple somewhere in the city and then eating out.

They were a reclusive pair, she recalled, childless and averse to social outings. They had lived on a narrow street in an unremarkable ethnically mixed middle class neighbourhood here in the capital. Bhawani said her husband was resolutely opposed to having a security guard at home. She herself was opposed to his joining the State peace secretariat. But she knew there was no blocking her husband's aspirations.

"He was a very stubborn person," Loganathan recalled one evening last week at home. "He would do what he wanted to do. No one could stop him."

By the time he was killed, he had been in frail health and gradually losing his hearing. A few days before his death, for reasons that still puzzle her, he told her he wished to die before her. She prayed quietly that she would survive him.

But before that, she remembered looking at him and asking him flatly, "Have you received a threat?" He said he had not. That evening, Bhawani recalled, they were upstairs watching the 9 o'clock television news together, when a man called out from the front gate.

She went to the balcony to have a look. She could make out a dark- coloured, old-model car parked outside and a man saying he had come from the Police Department for "Ketheshwaran." He spoke in flawless Sinhalese. It was not entirely unusual for a police officer to visit.

At the mention of the name, her husband rushed downstairs. From upstairs, she heard him asking for the visitor's identity card. Then she heard the gunshots.

The New York Times, October 31, 2006