Top Sea Tiger held in Chennai

(December, 09, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) The city police in Chennai arrested a Sea Tiger along with his accomplices when they were allegedly in the process of sending a boat to Sri Lanka to be used to smuggle essential commodities from India.

According to a press release issued by the State police on Sunday, Chennai city Q Branch, Crime wing police were engaged in routine surveillance on Saturday at the Chennai international airport. By 8 pm, three men were spotted moving around suspiciously in the car parking lot.


They were taken into custody and and investigation revealed that one of them was a sea tiger, other was a Lankan Tamil and another person was a Chennaite.

The Tiger cadre was identified as Jayakumar (34) of Velvettithurai, Jaffna and his accomplices as James alias Raja (46) belonging to Mannar Chinnakadai in Srilanka and Ravikumar (42) a resident of Subbarayan Nagar, Choolaimedu.

Jayakumar alias Gowri Shankar was on the rolls of LTTE’s naval wing Sea Tigers and had fought the lankan government from 1995 to 2006 and had come to India in February last. He was assigned by Soosai his tiger boss in lanka to procure a trawler for use at home shores.

Accordingly, Jayakumar landed in Tamilnadu and camped in Thanjavur and bought a boat with the help of Rs 4,80,000 sent by Soosai and Karuppaih — another LTTE man based at London. The purchased boat was parked at Mallipattinam in Thanjavur district.

The arrested LTTE man revealed that he had planned to send the boat to Srilanka with the help of James, also in custody now.

James had travelled to India three times in this year alone on valid papers. When he was here in October he had procured computer spare parts, swimming accessories and GPS devices and smuggled it to the war torn nation.

A sum of Rs 4,78,290 Indian currency and Rs 4140 Srilankan rupees and four mobile phones were confiscated. James said they had planned to give this to one Raji towards the cost of the boat.

The Chennai man is said to have helped the lankan Tamil to buy a boat. Police said further investigations are on to apprehend others who had helped the trio in their operation.