Two LTTE cadres had met the Naxals- Naxal leader

A senior Naxal leader who surrendered in Maharashtra, India last week has claimed that two LTTE cadres had at one time visited camps in India twice to give training to the Naxal terrorists. Naxal leader

Rainu told The Indian Express that the LTTE cadres had taught the Naxals how to lay mines and handle grenades.

Maoist groups in India have been known to collaborate with their counterparts across the border in Nepal and also occasionally with sympathisers elsewhere in South Asia but the senior Naxal leader claimed that a warfare expert from the Philippines also visited and stayed in a Bastar Naxal camp in Abujmad for about a month to train cadres, indicating the global reach of the extremist movement.

One of the three tribal members in the 22-member Andhra cadre-dominated Dandakaranya Special Zonal Committee created in 2007 to oversee activities in Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh, Rainu laid down arms saying he had had enough of what he called the romantic Naxal mirage of liberation after 22 years in the movement.

“It is not very difficult for LTTE men to pass off as Indians, but how the Naxals managed a safe passage for a Filipino into territory where even the police can’t go, and back, is very curious,” said a security official who did not want to be named.

Rainu is alleged to have been part of the 2003 police ambush in Kumarguda near Bhamragarh in Gadchiroli in which five policemen were killed, and another one in Fulbodigatta in 2005 that claimed four policemen. (The Indian Express)