Sri Lanka denies deal with ‘rump Tamil Tigers’
By ANIThursday, July 1, 2010
LONDON - Sri Lanka has denied reports that the government is forming an ‘alliance’ with the supporters of the Tamil Tigers.
According to BBC, Sri Lankan Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has said that he had recently met a group of ‘pro-LTTE’ diaspora Tamils in the country to discuss issues of humanitarian concern in the country.
“The visitors were a group who realised there was no purpose in continuing to confront the Colombo government and that they now preferred to work with it for the benefit of the Tamil people,” said Rajapaksa.
“The visitors had gone to the former LTTE strongholds of Jaffna and Kilinochchi and held discussions on all the improvements, the good and bad things”, he added.
The report stated that a detained senior LTTE leader, Selvarasa Pathmanathan, also known as KP had arranged the meeting between the two parties.
Rajapaksa, however said, that both the parties had met Pathmanathan but denied that he accompanied them on their visit to northern Sri Lanka.
Meanwhile, the pro-LTTE Tamil National Alliance (TNA) has sharply criticised the recent developments.
“It was a shame that a government which had described Pathmanathan as a ‘wanted terrorist’ now sought to have him defend its own actions,” Suresh Premachandran, one of TNA’s MPs, said. (ANI)
