A former officer of the Indian army, who had headed the peacekeeping force in Sri Lanka, has claimed that the then Indian High Commissioner to Colombo J N Dixit had asked him in 1987 to eliminate LTTE chief V Prabhakaran when he comes for a flag meeting with the force.
Skeletal remains of 80 bodies have been dug out of a mass grave in a former Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam stronghold in Sri Lanka, fuelling speculation that the bodies are of Tamil civilians who disappeared during the war with the rebels.
After talks in Oslo, the parties decided to explore a political solution founded on internal self-determination based on a federal structure within a united Sri Lanka.
The police have put in place a three-tier vigil mechanism across the zone, he said.
Twenty-two Tamil Tiger rebels were killed and five soldiers injured on Friday in a major pre-dawn assault by the Sri Lanka Army in the eastern district of Batticaloa.
The President is seeking an end to the spurt of violence.
'The struggle for Tamil equality and justice for Tamils did not start with the LTTE and will not end with LTTE. I am not saying that the LTTE has come to an end.'
The newspaper said the defence cooperation between Sri Lanka and Pakistan had grown significantly in recent years as Islamabad, unlike New Delhi, had no problems supplying the state-of-the-art weaponry to Lankan army to accelerate its counter-insurgency operations against the LTTE which finally ended with the killing of Tamil chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran.
As thousands of trapped civilians continued to flee the war zone, the Sri Lankan government today said the LTTE would be stamped out within the next 48 hours, signaling that a final offensive against Tigers was on.
Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa has debunked international criticism over the treatment of the island nation's Tamil minority population.
Uttam Ghosh offers his take on Gota's flight in the middle of the night.
'But he was very quick and did a very stylish adab.' 'Of course, I didn't expect him to hug.'
Sri Lanka has offered to hold talks with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam after a two-year gap, saying the outfit does represent a fair amount of Tamils but ruled out the immediate revival of the ceasefire scrapped in January.
Voters in Sri Lanka's Tamil majority Northern Province on Saturday began voting in the first local elections in 25 years to elect a council to govern the former war zone, four years after the military defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam after decades of bloody civil war.
Most politicians and even non-politicians have been honoured because of what they were purported to be electorally worth for the ruling party of their time, argues N Sathiya Moorthy.
'Assam Rifles have prevented a large number of genocides and killings.'
With the beleaguered Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam confined to a small area of 4.5 sq kms, Sri Lankan army chief Sarath Fonseka has said the troops are consolidating their positions despite heavy attacks from remnant rebel cadres in the north, where at least 21 guerrillas were killed in intense clashes.
He made every fighter of his guerrilla outfit wear a cyanide capsule, to be swallowed when they were facing arrest, but Vellupillai Prabhakaran himself did not carry one when he was killed by the Sri Lankan troops, in the last phase of the 30-year-old bloody civil war."Prabhakaran did not have a cyanide capsule on him. We did not find any such thing. Many other LTTE cadres had capsules with them, but not Prabhakaran," top defence sources said.
Everybody would like the Sri Lankan Tamils to live in peace first and with equal right to the Sinhalese. Even I, a vehement critic of the LTTE and also very much against the Centre intervening the military action against the LTTE, have been saying that the Indo-Sri Lankan accord must be implemented in full by Sri Lanka, says political analyst Cho Ramaswamy.
India considers the full implementation of the 13th Amendment in Sri Lanka "critical" for achieving reconciliation with the minority Tamil community, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Friday, underlining that New Delhi has always supported both the political and economic stability in the island nation.
The all-party meeting aimed at reconciliation and conferring full powers to Sri Lanka's provincial councils will be reconvened in a month after initial deliberations on Wednesday failed to yield any agreements, party officials said on Thursday.
India has been consistently calling upon Sri Lanka to fulfill its commitments to protect the interests of the Tamil community and preserve the island nation's character as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society.
'Unfortunately, there is no movement towards peace in Manipur.'
The Sri Lanka deputy high commissioner's office in Chennai is coordinating the efforts, it added.
The director is currently making Ceylon, ready for release in March 2014.
'That it was the LTTE was known in three weeks's time.'
India on Thursday abstained on a draft resolution in the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka which was adopted.
'Given that they are playing at home and will have full crowd support, India, who are in peak form and whose morale is high, will be the favourites.'
It all started a day after the IPL 2022 mega auction wherein Maheesh Theekshana, a rising off-spinner from Sri Lanka, was picked up by Chennai Super Kings for Rs 70 lakh (Rs 7 million).
R P Ravichandran, one of the six convicts who was released on Saturday in the assassination case of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, said that the people of north India should see them as 'victims instead of terrorists or killers'.
The Enforcement Directorate on Thursday said it has attached Indian assets of a Sri Lankan man and his son as part of a drugs-linked money laundering investigation against them.
The Rajiv Gandhi assassination, investigation and trial were all jinxed in parts, recalls N Sathiya Moorthy.
Deepa Gahlot lists 10 popular Mani Ratnam films that you can watch on streaming platforms.
The current question is about the BJP-ruled Centre, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, like its predecessors, not arguing the Union of India's case effectively and continuously, whenever the matter came up in the past, if its case still was that Rajiv's killing was an 'act of terror', asks N Sathiya Moorthy.
According to the book, 'Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes', authored by UK-based investigative journalist Phil Miller India's secret use of British mercenaries lasted for four months after the Indo-Lanka accord was signed between former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and then Sri Lankan president Junius Jayewardene in 1987.
Chowdhury, the leader of the Congress party in the Lok Sabha, claimed that his account was hacked as he was delivering a speech at a party office in West Bengal's Murshidabad district when the social media post was made.