He’s known only as KP, and he runs a shadowy smuggling network that stretches from the skyscrapers of New York to the suicide bomber training camps of Sri Lanka.
With a medium build, a mustache, slight paunch and thinning hair, the 52-year-old man blends easily into the places where he buys weapons for Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels, such as Thailand, Indonesia, Bulgaria and South Africa. And he operates right under the nose of the West, which experts say is so preoccupied with al-Qaeda that it largely ignores other terrorist group’s even one as accomplished as the Tamil Tigers.
In dozens of interviews with Sri Lankan officials, Western diplomats and former rebels, The Associated Press found that the Tigers raise $200 million (euro139 million) to $300 million (euro208million) a year, mostly through extortion and fraud. They then use front companies or middlemen to buy arms from legitimate weapons makers in Europe and Asia. They move the weapons back to Sri Lanka on their own ships, all to continue their 24-year-long fight to create a homeland for the Tamil minority.
The Tigers’ success in arming a 10,000-strong force has come into sharp focus in the past year with the resumption of full-scale civil war in Sri Lanka and a broadening investigation into alleged Tiger operatives in New York.
The investigation offers a glimpse of the Tigers’ methods and reach. More than a dozen suspects have been arrested for allegedly plotting to loot ATM machines and bribe US officials to drop the Tigers from Washington’s list of terror groups. One suspect once worked for Microsoft Corp. and allegedly helped the Tigers buy computers, according to court papers.
Another suspect arrested in Indonesia was caught with a laptop that had spreadsheets detailing more than $13 million in payments in the summer of 2006 for military equipment, including anti-aircraft guns and 100 tons of high explosives, court papers say. His passport showed more than 100 trips in the past five years to countries such as China, Kenya and even Sri Lanka.
Authorities are also looking into the dealings of a Wall Street financier suspected of donating millions of dollars to the rebels, say officials who spoke anonymously because the investigation is ongoing. He is identified only as “Individual B” in court papers and has not been arrested.
International efforts were supposed to shut down such operations after the Sept 11 attacks, but experts on terrorist financing say the Tigers’ network has thrived in the past six years. “After 9/11, the know-your-client principle was supposed to be integrated into the financial markets and into pretty much every business,” said Shanaka Jayasekra, a terrorism expert at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The Tigers are “showing what can be done to exploit the holes in this system.” Sri Lanka has stepped up its efforts to cut off rebel supply lines in a war that has killed 70,000 people over the past 24 years. Its navy has sunk seven insurgent ships in the last year, and several Tiger operatives in the United States, Europe and Australia have been arrested.
And on Friday, its air force bombed a rebel facility and killed five people, including a top rebel leader. But Sri Lanka’s resources are limited, as is the interest of the West. “If we find (Tiger operatives) breaking the law, of course we’ll go after them,” said one Western diplomat, who spoke anonymously to avoid upsetting Sri Lankan officials.
“But we’re not running around hunting for these guys.”Even some Islamic groups with ties to al-Qaeda blamed for bombings that have killed more than 300 people in India over the past two years fly largely below the radar of the major Western powers, said Peter Chalk of the Rand Corp., a US think tank. “No one is paying a bloody bit of attention to any other group” apart from al-Qaeda, especially one like the Tigers, whose fight is in a single, relatively poor country with little international clout, he said. These often-ignored groups “pose real threats,” Chalk said.
The Tigers’ network mirrors the sophistication of the mini-state they’ve built in northern Sri Lanka. There, they levy sales taxes 10 per cent on building materials, 7.5 per cent on car parts, 20 per cent on cigarettes to support their own courts, traffic police and military, a cult-like force whose fighters don’t drink or smoke, and who carry cyanide pills to swallow if they are captured.
Outside Sri Lanka, the Tigers’ network relies heavily on the Tamil diaspora, which has swelled to between 600,000 and 800,000. They run the socio-economic gamut from doctors and bankers in upscale New Jersey suburbs to construction workers and cab drivers in London’s gritty immigrant neighbourhoods. The diaspora has helped the Tigers set up front companies in more than a dozen countries, legitimately selling everything from dried fish in Thailand to mobile phones in Toronto. The Tigers provide seed money to start the businesses, which then return profits to the Tigers.
They also use their small fleet of oceangoing ships and dozens of smaller vessels to haul lawful cargo for paying clients. But the bulk of their money comes from large and lucrative communities of Tamils abroad more than 200,000 in Canada, about 110,000 in Britain, others in Western Europe, Australia and the United States. Some donate willingly.
“Others have to be convinced,” said a former Tiger who worked in London as a fundraiser. The preferred method of persuasion, he said, is threats aimed either directly at the unwilling donor or at relatives back in Sri Lanka, which is “always the easiest because they knew we were the law at home.”
If threats fail ”very rare” then “may be we would beat him. Or if he had a shop, we could smash it.” The former Tiger, who would not discuss why he left the group, spoke anonymously because he feared retribution and because it is a crime in Britain to raise money for a terrorist group.
Reports from activists such as Human Rights Watch detail dozens of cases of Tamils in London and Toronto being forced to donate.
