‘Shock and dismay’ on outcome in LTTE case

by Manjula FERNANDO

The Government has expressed ‘shock and dismay’ over the outcome in an Australian Court case which had allowed three proven LTTE fund-raisers, a listed terrorist organisation in over 30 countries to walk free with suspended sentences last Wednesday.

“We do not like to comment on matters of the judiciary of a another country but we would expect consideration being made to discourage terrorism and the perpetrators of terrorism,” Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama told the Sunday Observer yesterday afternoon.

Commenting on the lenient way the three terrorist suspects had been treated, he said, “We are quite shocked and dismayed’, and added that “A punishment is meant to be a deterrent to the perpetrators.’

The Victorian Supreme Court Justice Paul Coghlan who gave the suspended sentences on the three men who admitted to have raised US $1.03 million and donated 500 electronic devices that can be converted into bomb detonators to the LTTE, said he was satisfied that the trio had connections with the LTTE and knew that the organisation was a proven terrorist organisation, Australia’s ‘The Age’ reported.Nevertheless, the three men Arumugan Rajeevan, 44 from NSW and Aruran Vinayagamoorthy, 35 and Sivarajah Yathavan, 39 of Melbourne who were arrested in 2007 on terrorism charges by the Australian Federal Police were released on Wednesday.

They were running the Tamil Coordinating Committee (TCC), an alleged LTTE front in Australia.

Rajeevan and Yathavan were given one-year sentences each and Vinayagamoorthy, 18 months which were later reduced to Aus. $ 1,000 good behaviour bonds’ for three years in the case of the first two and for four years on Vinayagamoorthy. The LTTE is a banned terrorist organisation in many western countries including the US, UK, Canada and the EU. Although it is not proscribed in Australia, funding the LTTE is a Federal offence in the country in accordance with the UN resolution after the September 11 attack in New York.

The Federal Police during raids seized footage of Yathavan firing a large calibre gun at a LTTE camp in Sri Lanka and also footage of Rajeevan and Yathavan firing a machine gun on board an LTTE gunboat and visiting a terrorist training camp.