Boat being built in Kochi yard could have been for LTTE

The Q-Branch of the Tamil Nadu Police and the local Special Branch cops jointly raided the boat building yard of Sudha Marine Engineering Works on Wednesday morning to seize the half-built boat. The boatyard owners claimed they have no clue, as they had outsourced a part of their facilities to a local man, Benny, to construct the boat using workers sourced from Kozhikode.

Intelligence sources say this sturdy 65 x 72 feet steel boat being built as a deep-sea fishing craft could have been easily used for anything the LTTE would want it for, from turning it into an improvised weapons platform passing for a fishing craft, to gunrunning or other staple LTTE activities, with some later modifications in Sri Lanka.

Police sources said they zeroed in on the craft following leads from the arrest of two alleged LTTE cadre from Sri Lanka at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu a few days ago. They said the two, Prem Raj and ‘Diesel’ Kumar, had confessed to have been boat-shopping for the LTTE in Kerala, using money sent to them through the hawala route.

Benny maintained that he was contracted by a Kozhikode-based man who called himself Ismail, who paid him a token advance of Rs 12 lakh to begin construction, and has been regularly tracking the construction over phone. Benny claimed to have no more clue about the end-buyer or Ismail, whom he had met only a few months ago.

ADGP Punnoos said his department was in the know about the LTTE’s possible boat sourcing attempts in the state for a month and a half. “We have since been putting all boat building yards in the state under surveillance, and are trying to track the details. But it’s not easy, not many boats are being officially registered and we don’t even have the numbers yet,” the ADGP said. Two years ago, Kerala had ordered that all boats put out to sea should be compulsorily registered. The boat owners and fishworkers unions raised a huge din, and the order was never implemented.

About half the boats fishing in the sea off the Kerala coasts any given season are from Tamil Nadu. “There is no mechanism to keep track of them and many are known to come in from the Sethusamudram area that the LTTE frequents. If they want to source an unregistered vessel from a Kerala boatyard, they can easily manage it in such traffic,” Ponnoos added.

Three months ago, Vice-Admiral Sunil K Damle, Flag officer Commanding-in-Chief of the Southern Naval Command, had said the LTTE was shifting its activities to the Kerala coast now, to avert the close surveillance of the Navy and the Coast Guard along the Tamil Nadu coast.

Interestingly, the Coast Guard’s Western Region chief, Commandant A Rajasekhar, had played down the Navy’s threat projection, saying his force had no evidence of any LTTE activity along the west coast and knew of no such threat.

Punnoos, however, says the LTTE has been clearly known to be sourcing its supplies from along the coast. “They usually take care to use three or more layers of local intermediaries to procure what they want. The intermediaries may not even know who is footing the bill.”

LTTE doesn’t always buy

• Buying boats apart, the LTTE may also be prone to hijacking local vessels on occasions. Last year, the Maldivian Navy had shot to bits an LTTE gunrunning boat off its coast, only to find that it was from Kerala. Later, the boat’s Keralite mechanic, Simon Soza, who survived the attack along with a few LTTE cadre, was let off after it turned out that the craft was taken over by the LTTE on the high seas. Soza was not killed like his mates only because the captors wanted him alive to repair and drive the boat that they used for the next weeks for their clandestine business.