Tigers supplied forged passports to World Trade Center killer

Walter JAYAWARDHANA

WASHINGTON: The LTTE supplied forged passports to Ramzi Yousef who bombed the World Trade Center, counter terrorism expert Aaron Mannes said.

He was commenting on the report about the Tigers stealing Norwegian passports and selling them to al-Qaeda affiliates in the Daily News of March 20.

Mannes in his commentary, published in the Counterterrorism Blog quoting Rohan Gunaratne, said the Sri Lankan terrorist group not only supplied forged passports to Yousef, it also smuggled weapons from Pakistan’s militants to their counterparts in Philippines.

Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 bombing at New York’s World Trade Center, was sentenced to a jail term of 240 years without parole and is spending his time in a US federal jail. The attack killed six and injured more than 1,000.

After three days of deliberation in 1996, a federal jury convicted Yousef and Eyad Ismoil on murder and conspiracy charges for their roles in a plot by extremists to topple the Trade Center’s two 110-story tower to punish the United States for its support of Israel.

Yousef has also been implicated in bombing a Japanese air plane and a series of other terrorist activities connected with al- Qaeda activities including those in the Philippines.

Writing further in the blog Mannes said: “The LTTE has an international network of support among the Tamil diaspora and, because of Sri Lanka’s strategic location astride shipping lanes, it owns a fleet of sea-going vessels.

So it is well positioned to play a role in trans-national criminal activity. The passport sales only highlights how terrorism is the tip of the iceberg of trans-national threats.”

Mannes further wrote: “In the past I’ve written that the US should expand its efforts against the LTTE because it was morally consistent with targeting terrorists, it would contribute to stability on the Indian-subcontinent, and because the LTTE was embedded in international criminal networks that also service Islamist terrorists.

It would appear, based on some high profiles arrests of LTTE operatives in the US that this has happened.”