US Ices Assets for LTTE Helper
Tamil Rehabilitation Organization Funds Frozen
The US has decided to freeze assets of a group it says helps a Sri Lankan terrorist group purchase weapons and wage a bloody insurgency.
The US government said Thursday it is freezing the assets of the Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, an international support group for Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger terrorists, as well as prohibiting persons in the US from making transactions with the group.
The Tamil Rehabilitation Organization, which has myriad branches across the world, supports Tamil Tigers by funneling charity and other contributions to the separatist group, the US Treasury Department said in a statement.
The US was the first country to take such measures, the Sri Lankan Embassy in Washington said.
“The message we’ve carried to the world is that we need to stop LTTE fundraising, and we appreciate that the US has done this for us,” an embassy official told me Friday. “We know that other countries will follow.”
The asset freeze could bring the insurgents to the negotiating table, the official said. “They will realize that only as money stops coming in. As long as they have funds to fight, then they will not talk peace.”
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been waging an increasingly bloody movement in Sri Lanka since the early 1980s, growing more sophisticated in their money collection and weapons purchases over the years, Sri Lankan terrorism experts say. As many as 60,000 people have died as a result of the group’s separatist fight, andhe US government put the LTTE on its list of foreign terrorist groups in 1997.
The LTTE raises as much as $300 million annually, mostly through collections from Tamil groups abroad. The group collects money through elaborate extortion and fundraising schemes.
The Tamils are a minority group on Sri Lanka, and the Tamil Tigers have managed to carve for themselves an autonomous region on the northern tip of the island, in Jaffna province, from where they execute operations against the Sri Lankan government, including suicide attacks.
In October 2007, the Tamil Tigers, a US-designated terrorist organization, destroyed 18 government planes, jets and helicopters through the use of two assembled Cessna “bombers” and suicide saboteurs.
The Treasury Department said Thursday it now considered TRO a fundraiser for the group.
“TRO passed off its operations as charitable, when in fact it was raising money for a designated terrorist group responsible for heinous acts of terrorism,” Adam J. Szubin, Director of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets, said in a statement.
The group also has aided LTTE procurement operations in the United States. The FBI recently prosecuted a case of four Tamil Tiger agents, accused of seeking to purchase through US night vision goggles, sniper rifles, submachine guns, flash suppressors, grenade launchers, communication devices, spare parts for helicopters and aircraft, sonar technology, and unmanned aerial vehicles.
The TRO is suspected of having funnelled humanitarian aid following the December 2004 tsunami to the Tamil Tigers, the Treasury Department said, allowing the separatists “to launch new campaigns to strengthen LTTE military capacity.”
The TRO has branches in the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, the Treasury Department said.
