Chennai: A few days ago the Nagapattinam Police in Tamil Nadu conducted raids and seized 300 kg of ganja which was to be ferried to Sri Lanka in a country boat.
The police arrested six people and the Tamil Nadu Coastal police conducted searches at several godowns and other fishing hamlets near the port town of Nagapattinam to unearth further stocks.
The ganja, according to the peddlers, was procured from the Andhra Pradesh and Odisha border which was to be sent to Sri Lanka.
Tamil Nadu intelligence agency sources told IANS that they had received tip-offs from central agencies that some Tamil nationalist groups were behind the smuggling of ganja to Sri Lanka.
National Investigation Agency (NIA) has registered many cases against Sri Lankan nationals who were former operatives of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) involved in smuggling of drugs, ferrying arms and indulging in hawala transactions to raise the funds for the revival of LTTE movement.
Tamil Nadu Police sources said that people who push ganja into Sri Lanka return with heroin. This is for raising funds for the revival of the now defunct LTTE.
The Narcotics Control Bureau has also arrested Alla Pitchai, a close associate of senior LTTE intelligence operative Satnukam alias Sabesan in Chennai.
He was one of the key operatives who provided logistics support to the drug cartels of India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. LTTE operative Satnukam alias Sabesan has been in jail since October 2021 in a case related to smuggling of heroin worth Rs 3,000 crore while five AK 47 assault rifles and pellets have also been recovered from him.
National Investigation Agency (NIA) has also questioned Alla Pitchai in the Rs 3,000 crore heroin smuggling case in which Sabesan is under judicial custody.
Interestingly, several Tamil nationalist groups and movements are functioning in Tamil Nadu with the sole objective to revive LTTE. Notorious Haji Ali network of Pakistan has also been pushing drugs into the Indian and Sri Lankan markets. It is also alleged that a former LTTE operative is behind this drug cartel.
A retired senior police officer told IANS: “Some former operatives of LTTE are now in camps in Tamil Nadu and we have rounded up a few. However, the regular seizure of high-quality ganja is being seen as a move by these elements to push it into Sri Lanka and from there heroin is being moved into India. These moves are to raise funds for the revival of LTTE.”
In December 2022, NIA arrested nine Sri Lankan nationals from Tamil refugee camp at Tiruchi for their alleged involvement in ferrying drugs and arms.
NIA said that they were in the process of reviving the defunct LTTE using the funds garnered by smuggling.
The nine arrested include C. Gunashekharan alias Guna, who is a resident of Colombo, is considered a key person in the revival of LTTE. NIA had said that Gunashekharan had aligned with Haji Salim, a Pakistani national who has been pushing drugs and arms into Sri Lanka from Pakistan.
On March 29, 2022, a Sri Lankan woman, Mary Fransicka, was arrested by NIA while she was boarding a flight to Mumbai to revive a defunct bank account in a nationalised bank. The woman had arrived from Canada and was part of an international Tamil network.
NIA had said that Mary Franciska, T. Kenniston Fernando and K. Bhaskaran entered into a conspiracy with foreign entities to siphon off deposits in dormant bank accounts by using Indian identity documents obtained fraudulently and forging identity documents to revive, revamp and regroup LTTE in India and Sri Lanka.
NIA had said that they were abetted by Johnson Samuvel, Dharmendran and Mohan in forging Indian identity documents.
The revival of LTTE is a major agenda for certain Tamil groups and the drug cartels are being used as a major support base for raising funds for the revival of the movement.
(IANS)
