Premadasa aided LTTE: Panel

COLOMBO, March 15: A Sri Lankan judicial commission probing into the 1992 assassination of a popular army commander has come out with startl...

COLOMBO, March 15: A Sri Lankan judicial commission probing into the 1992 assassination of a popular army commander has come out with startling revelations that a senior cabinet minister in late President Premadasa’s cabinet handed over arms consignments to the LTTE in Jaffna a day after rebels massacred 227 policemen in the east in 1990.

The judicial commission headed by a Supreme Court judge in its final report said the then Sri Lankan foreign minister, R A C Shameed flew to Palaly in Jaffna twice on June 12 and 15, 1990, handed over large number of parcels to LTTE leaders and later held parleys with them even after the LTTE shot and killed 227 policemen a day before that.

The policemen from three police stations in the eastern Batticaloa district were forced to surrender to the LTTE and told by the rebels that they would be sent back to their headquarters, a report published in the state run Daily News last Friday said.

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Quoting a senior police official, it said the policemen, after their surrender,were driven in buses to the thick forests near Thirukkovil in the district the same night and massacred by LTTE gunmen.

Troops found mass graves and decomposed bodies after a lone police constable who had managed to escape the massacre later guided them there. The LTTE attack on the three police stations in the east came three months after the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), which came to Sri Lanka to enforce the 1987 Indo-Lanka accord, left the island in March, 1990. The IPKF left after Premadasa, who was the prime minister when the accord was signed, took over the Presidency from late J R Jayawardene.