21 June 2010 04:16 am
Sri Lanka has warned Australia about a ship carrying 200 suspected LTTE cadres on its way to Australia, but is unaware if there are top Tiger leaders among them or where the ship set off from.
Sri Lanka’s High Commissioner to Australia Senaka Welgampaya speaking to Daily Mirror online said that he had received information that a ship named, ‘Sun Sea’ carrying some 200 suspected LTTE cadres is on its way to Australia but he did not have further details regarding those on board.
“The Australian High Commission has been informed and they were informed a while back, so they are quite aware about it. The ship is called Sun Sea but we don’t know what flag they are carrying,” he said.
When contacted by Daily Mirror online Navy spokesperson Captain Athula Senarath said that he has not received any information about the vessel and that the Navy is not involved in this matter at the moment.
Australian media reports had earlier said that the ship was to head for Canada but had later changed direction and was heading to Australia. Meanwhile
the Canadian media reported that at least 25 of the 76 men who arrived in British Columbia aboard the Ocean Lady migrant ship last October were members of the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group outlawed in Canada.
The Canada Border Services Agency report, marked “secret,” raises the possibility the ship’s entire journey to Canada might have been financed and organized by the terrorist group to help settle surviving militants abroad after its military defeat by the Sri Lankan government last year.
The Ocean Lady -a name spray-painted on a ship registered as the Easwary -arrived in B.C. on Oct. 16. All 76 aboard claimed refugee status. News reports at the time suggested at least one or two of the migrants aboard might have been members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. But the border report said that the former militants, most of them middle-ranked fighters, could use Canadaas a major base of operations in the future. (Daily Mirror online)
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