Roaring tiger silenced

Velupillai Prabhakaran,who led a ruthless movement for more than three decades,was a dogged fighter for a separate homeland for Tamils in Sri Lanka....

Velupillai Prabhakaran,who led a ruthless movement for more than three decades,was a dogged fighter for a separate homeland for Tamils in Sri Lanka,but his opponents saw him as a megalomaniac who never tolerated dissent.

The 54-year-old son of a Government officer and a school dropout,he pioneered suicide bombing and cyanide death for cadres under attack in the war for Tamil Eelam that consumed more than 70,000 lives,which included those of scores of Sinhalese and Tamil leaders.

Started in 1972 as the Tamil New Tigers by a group of young boys headed by him and renamed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in 1975,the outfit became aggressive after the infamous Wellikade Jail massacre in which separatist leaders Kuttimani and Jagan were eliminated by the forces. The LTTE occasionally paused for diplomacy,first initiated by India in Thimpu in 1985 and later by Norway in 2002.

Prabhakaran led the LTTE from the secret jungles of Wanni in northern Sri Lanka and survived many a battle,but the current assault from the Lankan forces ended his dream as well as his life. A freedom fighter for his supporters and a dreaded terrorist for others,Prabhakaran was wanted by Interpol and other organisations since 1990 for terrorism,murder and organised crime.

Known as thambi younger brother,Prabhakaran was responsible for the elimination of Sinhalese leaders and LTTE dissenters. After the LTTEs battle with the IPKF in the jungles of Sri Lanka,Prabhakaran targeted Rajiv Gandhi and chose Sriperumbudur near Chennai to kill him during the election campaign in 1991 by using a suicide bomber.

Born on 26 November,1954 in the northern coastal town of Velvettithurai on the Jaffna peninsula,Prabhakaran,the youngest of four children,began attending political meetings and practising martial arts and soon became involved in the Tamil protest movement. He carried out his first political murder against the mayor of Jaffna,Alfred Duraiappah,a fellow Tamil,by shooting him at point blank range while he was about to enter a Hindu temple at Ponnaalai.

Though no one is sure about Prabhakarans personal life,he got married to Madhi Vadhani on October 1,1984 in Tirupporur near Chennai and has a daughter named Duwaraka and two sonsCharles Anthony and Balachandran. While Charles was in the battlefront during the final phase of the war,the whereabouts of others are not known,but it is widely speculated that they are not in Sri Lanka.