Tamil Muslim Global Arms Trafficking Ignored
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071105/ap_on_re_as/sri_lanka_tiger_inc__abridgedSri Lanka rebel arms-buying goes global By MATTHEW ROSENBERG, Associated Press Writer
Mon Nov 5, 2:40 PM ET
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka - He's known only as KP, and he runs a shadowy smuggling network that stretches from the skyscrapers of New York to the suicide bomber training camps of Sri Lanka.
At 52, with a medium build, mustache, slight paunch and thinning hair, KP operates right under the nose of the West, which experts say is so preoccupied with al-Qaida that it largely ignores other terrorist groups, even ones as accomplished as Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers.
The Tigers are thought to have pioneered the explosive vests used in suicide bombings, and with the West distracted, they carry out crimes worldwide — such as an alleged plan to loot ATM machines in New York — to fund their fight for a homeland for Sri Lanka's Tamil minority. It's a campaign that has led to 70,000 deaths in the past 24 years.
In dozens of interviews with Sri Lankan officials, Western diplomats and former rebels, The Associated Press found that the Tigers raise $200 million to $300 million a year, mostly through extortion and fraud. They then use front companies or middlemen to buy arms from legitimate weapons makers in Europe and Asia and move them back to Sri Lanka on their own ships.
KP, for example, buys weapons in places like Thailand, Indonesia, Bulgaria and South Africa. He has dozens of passports — Indian, Egyptian, Malaysian and more — along with a steady hand for forging whatever paperwork he doesn't have, Sri Lankan officials say.
The money comes from places like New York, where eight suspects have been arrested in the ATM scandal and seven others are accused of trying to bribe U.S. officials to drop the Tigers from the government's list of terror groups. One suspect once worked for Microsoft Corp. and allegedly helped the Tigers buy computers, according to court papers.
Another suspect was caught with a laptop with spreadsheets detailing more than $13 million in payments in the summer of 2006 for military equipment, including anti-aircraft guns and 100 tons of high explosives, court papers say. His passport showed more than 100 trips in the past five years to countries such as China, Kenya and even Sri Lanka.
Authorities are also investigating a Wall Street financier suspected of donating millions of dollars to the rebels. He is identified only as "Individual B" in court papers and has not been arrested.
The Tigers' success in arming a 10,000-strong force has come into sharp focus in the past year with the resumption of full-scale civil war in Sri Lanka. Experts on terrorist financing say the Tigers' network has thrived even after the al-Qaida attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"After 9/11, the know-your-client principle was supposed to be integrated into the financial markets and into pretty much every business," said Shanaka Jayasekra, a terrorism expert at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The Tigers are "showing what can be done to exploit the holes in this system."
Sri Lanka has stepped up its efforts to cut off rebel supply lines. Its navy has sunk seven insurgent ships in the last year, and several suspected Tiger operatives in the United States, Europe and Australia have been arrested. And on Friday, its air force bombed a rebel facility and killed five people, including a top rebel leader.
But Sri Lanka's resources are limited, as is the interest of the West.
"If we find (Tiger operatives) breaking the law, of course we'll go after them," said one Western diplomat, who spoke anonymously to avoid upsetting Sri Lankan officials. "But we're not running around hunting for these guys."
Even Islamic groups with ties to al-Qaida — such as Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, blamed for killing more than 300 Indians in bombings over the past two years — fly largely below the radar of the West, noted Peter Chalk of the Rand Corp., a U.S. think tank.
"No one is paying a bloody bit of attention to any other group" apart from al-Qaida, especially one like the Tigers, whose fight is in a relatively poor country, said Chalk. These often ignored groups "pose real threats."
The Tigers' network mirrors the sophistication of the mini-state they've built in northern Sri Lanka. There, they levy sales taxes — 10 percent on building materials, 7.5 percent on car parts, 20 percent on cigarettes — to support their own courts, traffic police and military, a cult-like force whose fighters don't drink or smoke, wait until their mid-20s to marry and carry cyanide pills to swallow if they are captured.
The Tigers have set up front companies in more than a dozen countries, legitimately selling everything from dried fish in Thailand to mobile phones in Toronto. The Tigers give seed money to the businesses in return for profits. They also use their small fleet of ships to haul lawful cargo for paying clients.
But the bulk of their money comes from the Tamil diaspora, which stands at between 600,000 and 800,000 people, many of whom fled the war and often-violent persecution by Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority. They run the socio-economic gamut from doctors and bankers in upscale New Jersey suburbs to construction workers and cab drivers in London's gritty immigrant neighborhoods.
Some donate willingly. "Others have to be convinced," said a former Tiger who worked in London as a fundraiser.
The preferred method of persuasion, he said, is threats aimed either directly at the unwilling donor or at family members back in Sri Lanka, which is "always the easiest because they knew we were the law at home."
If threats fail — "very rare" — then "maybe we would beat him. Or if he had a shop, we could smash it."
The former Tiger, who would not discuss why he left the group, spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution and because it is a crime to raise money for a terror group in Britain. Reports from activists such as Human Rights Watch detail dozens of such cases in London and Toronto.
The Tigers find fundraisers who have never actually fought in Sri Lanka so they won't be on any watch lists. The former Tiger said the money was deposited in bank accounts under his own name at Natwest, and then transferred to an HSBC account, also in London. Where it went from there, he couldn't say.
It's a safe bet, though, that at least some of it ended up with KP and his team.
KP is, said one Western diplomat, "like something out of a James Bond movie." He emerged as the chief weapons supplier of the Tigers in the late 1980s, after India withdrew its clandestine support. He has surfaced as far afield as Vietnam and South Africa and has had bank accounts in London, Singapore, Frankfurt and Bangkok.
He is now believed to live in Thailand, where he owns at least one company and a boatyard and is married to a Thai woman, Sri Lankan officials say.
In the early days, KP picked up weapons wherever he could — Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan, Cambodia, the weapons bazaars of the former Soviet Union. But by the mid-1990s, KP's team was arranging for 70,000 mortar shells bought by the Sri Lankan government from Zimbabwe Defense Industries to be diverted to the Tigers by allegedly bribing an Israeli subcontractor.
It was about this time that KP began using forged or illegally obtained documents to buy weapons — a strategy shown in purchases from China North Industries Corp., known as Norinco, a state-run company.
According to former and current Sri Lankan intelligence officials, Norinco sold the Tigers two consignments of assault rifles, light artillery, rockets and ammunition, each large enough to fill a 230-foot cargo ship. The purchases were arranged through a middleman as part of a larger order certified with North Korean documents, presumably obtained through bribery, the officials said. The consignments were loaded onto rebel-owned ships in September 2003 and October 2004 in Tianjin, China.
The weapons are then believed to have gone to a supply point along the Indian Ocean coast of either Thailand or Indonesia, and been loaded into smaller ships and then even smaller fishing boats to make it past Sri Lanka's navy into rebel territory.
Senior Chinese officials were first warned of the purchases in July 2006, said a former Sri Lankan official who helped prepare a dossier laying out evidence for them. But a third order remained on track for delivery in spring 2007 until Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa personally appealed to Chinese leaders in Beijing in February, the official said.
Two officials said the Chinese, who were described as extremely apologetic, have launched an investigation into the sales. At Norinco's parent company, China North Industries Group Corp., the director of the information office refused to comment.
"We are not authorized to answer such very sensitive questions," the director, who gave his name as Jiang, said before hanging up.
In the last two years, KP is also thought to have arranged for arms from Bulgaria and North Korea, Sri Lankan officials say. So when news broke in early September that he had been caught in Thailand, the Sri Lankans were ecstatic. "It's almost too good to be true," gushed a senior official.
But Thailand — where KP is widely believed to have ties to senior officials — hastily denied the arrest. And within days, Sri Lankan officials glumly acknowledged he had again disappeared.
___
Associated Press reporter Tom Hays in New York and Kwang-tae Kim in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this story.
What is truly angering is how this Nazi kike, even in the midst of explaining the severe danger posed by the worldwide Tamil Muslim mafia (which he playfully calls "rebels"), manages to get in his hateful blood libel against the Sinhalese (the Serbs of south Asia):
But the bulk of their money comes from the Tamil diaspora, which stands at between 600,000 and 800,000 people, many of whom fled the war and often-violent persecution by Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority.
Let us all pray that this piece of Amalek is soon chopped up the way Yankel Rosenbaum (zt"l) was.
Chaimfan
Topic: Sri Lankan Muslim Nazis Flourish Worldwide (Read 1276 times)