Assam unearth more evidence:

Tigers gun-running for other groups

Walter JAYAWARDHANA

Evidence that Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was also gunrunning for other separatist terrorist groups in India using its navy for profit has been unearthed in the Indian State of Assam.

There was a noting in one of the accounts statement that the ULFA paid Rs. 2.3 million to the LTTE towards the purchase of weapons, an Indian army commander said, after unearthing a cache of arms belonging to the United Liberation Front of Asom, a separatist terrorist group in the Indian State of Assam.

On October 19, Indian soldiers of the 19 Kumaon Regiment captured a large cache of weapons and explosives buried inside a pit, besides documents relating to the ULFA financial transactions with the LTTE.

A pro-talk section leader of the terrorist group reportedly told an agency: ‘It was sometime in the early 90s when I was just an ordinary member at the Lakhipathar camp (in eastern Assam Tinsukia district) when we saw three lanky Tamil men with our commander-in-chief Par-esh Baruah.

We were later told they were from the LTTE. Prabal Neog, a senior leader of the pro-talk ULFA faction, who said that he belongs to the Alpha and Charlie companies of the ULFA 28th battalion, the most potent striking unit of the outfit, announced a unilateral ceasefire in June last year.

The group now in a ceasefire mode named themselves as the pro-talk ULFA faction, the news agency Indo Asian News Service said.

The news report further said, links between a leading Indian militant group and the Tigers have for the first time been confirmed by a rebel leader Wednesday, two days after the army seized documents stating payments made towards weapons bought from the Tigers.

There were several reports in the past quoting intelligence reports that the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) had direct links with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

The ULFA-LTTE links were established sometime in the early 1990s with LTTE guerrillas training ULFA cadres in the jungles of Assam, according to intelligence and police inputs.

LTTE supplied arms to ULFA through its navy with the consignments handed over in Chittagong (Bangladesh) to ULFA leaders, an intelligence official said.