AFP

Kuala Lumpur

Three men suspected of being Tamil Tigers have been arrested in Malaysia, a top police official said yesterday, accusing them of attempting to revive theSri Lankan separatist group.

Khalid Abu Bakar, inspector-general of police, said the trio, who had been in Malaysia since 2004, were arrested in multiple raids in the central Selangor state on May 15, and were being held under the Immigration Act.

“They used Malaysia as a base to collect funds, spread their propaganda, and were attempting to revive the defunct terrorist group at the international level,” he said in a
statement.

Police also seized propaganda materials of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and some money in various foreign currencies.

There is a small but affluent Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora living in multi-racial Malaysia after migrating from their homeland many decades ago.

Khalid said they were registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and so had been able to remain in Malaysia since 2004 without visas.

“We will not allow the country to be used as a place for them to hide or conduct any terror activities in the country or on foreign soil,” he said.

Sri Lanka’s military killed Tiger supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran on May 18, 2009 and declared an end to 37 years of armed conflict.

There have been no major attacks blamed on the group since.

The Tigers, who during the height of their power controlled nearly a third of Sri Lanka’s territory, were known for their trademark suicide bombings.

Last month, Sri Lanka had sent out an alert demanding that Norway’s government arrest Perinpanayagam Sivaparan, an Oslo-based Tamil, claiming that he is the new leader of the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

According to an article in the pro-government Sunday Observer newspaper, Sri Lankan police in April issued “red notices”, effectively an international arrest warrant, for 40 members of the LTTE,
including for Sivaparan.

So far, Sivaparan’s name does not appear on the Interpol database.

Norway briefly arrested Sivaparan in Oslo in 2011, interviewing him over his role in financing operations for the LTTE among the Tamil diaspora in The Netherlands and then releasing him on conditional bail.

But while the five Dutch Tamils were in October 2011 jailed for six months by a court in The Hague for raising money for an organisation on the European Union’s banned list, Sivaparan has not been called back by Norwegian police.

Sri Lanka has been increasing its pressure on its restive Tamil minority this year. In April, the government security forces claimed to have killed three LTTE activists, in the first gun battle since the long-running civil war in Sri Lanka ended five years ago.

Sri Lanka’s government believes that Tamil activists are trying to revive the LTTE, which waged a 26-year struggle to establish a separate Tamil state in northern Sri Lanka
until it was defeated in 2009.