Fleeing terror in Lanka to death at sea off India

The two boatmen who brought them on the horror ride disappeared along with three refugees, two women and a child. All of them are believed to be dead.

Since January this year, a trickle of Sri Lankan refugees has been heading for India after escalation of hostilities between the Tigers and Lankan troops. More than 1,000 Lankan Tamils fleeing violence have landed on Rameshwaram shores.

Many of them are picked up from the shores by the Navy and the Coast Guard and brought to Dhanushkodi to be registered at the police station. Then they are put up at the refugee camp in Mandapam.

Today’s grief-stricken arrivals from across the sea were the sixth group to land in Rameshwaram. Since the early hours today, 71 refugees arrived by boats at Dhanushkodi and nearby Pamban and were taken to the Mandapam camp.

The scene at the naval detachment in Rameshwaram,where the refugees and the bodies of their relatives were brought this afternoon was tinged with grief.

The 17 refugees had fled the Lankan army controlled Pallathottam and Pathaankurichi villages near Trincomalee in eastern Sri Lanka, witnessing the fallout of a dissipating ceasefire between Lankan armed forces and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Jawkar (14) and his brother Aravind (11) could not stop shivering. They sat close, pressing against each other for comfort.

They said that around 2 a.m. today, as they struggled to hold on to the overturned boat, gulping seawater as the angry waves tried to wrench their grip, they had seen their mother, Bhuwanawathi, and Archana (9) being swallowed by the sea.

‘‘We never got their bodies,’’ said Jawkar, breaking down. Their father, Jayamohan, a fisherman, had ‘‘disappeared into the sea’’ two years ago, they said. This could mean anything — either he had joined the ‘Iyakkam (‘movement’ as the LTTE struggle is called by the Tamils) — or killed.

The group of families had left Talaimannar shores at about 10 p.m. crowding into a fibre-plastic boat on a rough sea last night.

‘‘About 12:30, a huge wave crashed into the boat, half flooding it with water. The two boatmen frantically tried to restart the engine. Some of us began to bale out the water. But the next wave which struck overturned the boat and all of us fell into the sea,’’ said Mohan Kandasamy (18), who left Pallathottam with his eight-member family.

Now, only he, his father and younger brother are alive. His three sisters and grandparents are dead. Only nine of them could survive the angry, lashing waves and hold on to the boat. When after a two hour struggle, their feet touched sand, they quickly waded to the nearest sand dune.

Young boys in the group managed to drag some of the bodies ashore. By 8:30 a.m., they were spotted by a naval aircraft on a routine sortie and brought to the naval detachment in a boat.

The sudden, big refugee inflow into Indian shores has been triggered by retaliatory attacks in Tamil villages in Trincomalee district in eastern Sri Lanka.

Tamils are fleeing Thirukkadalur and surrounding fishing hamlets after a woman, Mahalakshmi and her 18-year-old daughter, Selvakumari, were brutally hacked, reportedly by Sinhalese on April 12, two days before the Tamil New Year.

The two women had gone shopping at the Trincomalee town bazaar when a bomb went off, killing five. ‘‘ Soon after that, the army allowed the Sinhalese to let loose arson and mayhem. They single out the shops owned by Tamils, loot them and set fire to them and kill the owners,’’ said Chinnaya Anandamoorthy, who arrived with his wife and their one-year-old daughter at Dhanushkodi this morning.

It was his sister, Mahalakshmi, who was stabbed near the Trincomalee town market, and his niece slaughtered.

Many refugees who had seen the teenager’s brutalized body are recovering from the shock at the Mandapam camp near Rameshwaram.

jaya.menon@expressindia.com