Colombo:
Labelling it as a “main rip-off”, the prolonged household of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) chief Velupillai Prabhakaran has urged all Tamils in India and world wide to not fall into the entice laid out by sure components within the diaspora fraternity who’ve been accumulating hundreds of thousands of {dollars} by saying that the slain Tamil chief remains to be alive.
Karthic Manoharan, the son of Prabhakaran’s elder brother Velupillai Manoharan, instructed IANS {that a} “mafia gang” which desires to make use of Prabhakaran as a “model identify” and collects funds from Tamils residing world wide is working at a serious scale.
V. Prabhakaran was killed through the closing levels of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long bloody struggle in opposition to the LTTE, which was crushed by the Lankan safety forces in Might 2009.
“Give due respect to the lifeless. Not a penny given to the gang of fraudsters, who had been claiming that Prabhakran is alive, will go to the household or the poor and struggling Tamils in war-ravaged Sri Lanka, and as a substitute find yourself of their pockets,” mentioned Karthic, the 43-year-old nephew of the late LTTE supreme chief.
Branding the alleged fraudsters as “liars”, Karthic named some Indian Tamil leaders and Lankan-born Tamil Eelam campaigners for operating a marketing campaign to resurrect his lifeless uncle Prabhakaran and his solely daughter Dwaraka Prabhakaran.
Manoharan’s household has maintained an especially low profile since they left Sri Lanka in 1983. They lastly broke their silence after some diaspora teams in Switzerland enacted a pretend drama with an AI-manipulated video speech of Dwaraka Prabhakaran on ‘Maaveerar Naal’ or ‘Nice Heroes Day’ on November 27, 2023.
“We have to put an finish to this nonsense. My uncle together with his complete household died over the past levels of the struggle. This had been confirmed and if any of them had been alive, they’d have contacted us as all of us had been fairly shut and he used to name us from Sri Lanka,” the nephew mentioned.
He added that the ultimate dialog his household had with Prabhakaran was in 2008, a yr earlier than the struggle got here to an finish.
“My uncle, in what turned out to be his final name, mentioned that the scenario was actually unhealthy in Sri Lanka,” Karthic mentioned.
Prabhakaran’s mother and father had been taken to India by Karthic’s father Manoharan in 1983 together with the remainder of the household after the ethnic struggle broke out in Sri Lanka, with the navy trying to find the LTTE chief.
The household lived in Tamil Nadu for 13 years until 1998 after which migrated to Denmark by way of a UN company.
“My father was planning to begin a enterprise in India however then Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination occurred and my uncle was the suspect. So, my dad was requested to go away India,” the Tamil insurgent chief’s nephew instructed IANS.
The household later approached the UNHCR and moved to the Scandinavian nation in 1996 which accepted their plea first.
Nonetheless, Karthic mentioned that as a result of the household was associated to the LTTE chief, they obtained “ill-treatment” from some diaspora teams in Denmark who had been amassing cash within the identify of the insurgent motion.
“Having travelled from India, we had been additionally branded as RAW brokers,” mentioned Karthic, who expressed gratitude to the Indian authorities for permitting the household to remain within the nation for greater than a decade.
Karthic initially believed that his grandparents had been additionally killed over the past days of the struggle in Might 2009. The household later got here to know that they had been alive and had been stored in a military camp till his grandfather’s loss of life was introduced in 2010. Prabhakaran’s mom additionally died later.
One in every of Karthic’s aunts (sister of Prabhakaran) nonetheless lives in India along with her household whereas one other resides in Canada.
Nonetheless, he mentioned, the prolonged household nonetheless can not meet one another or journey on account of many visa points and concern of not having the ability to return.
(Aside from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
