Reiterating its position on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the U.S. State Department has held that the LTTE’s international network of sympathisers and financial support persists.
The State Department’s assessment, through its ‘Country Reports on Terrorism for 2014,’ acknowledges that the LTTE, which suffered military defeat in May 2009 at the hands of the Sri Lankan government led by Mahinda Rajapaksa, has been “largely inactive” since then. Yet, it adds, “the LTTE’s financial network of support continued to operate throughout 2014.”
Following the end of the Eelam War IV, there have been “no known attacks in Sri Lanka” that could verifiably be attributed to the LTTE but “a total of 13 LTTE supporters, several of which had allegedly planned attacks against U.S. and Israeli diplomatic facilities in India, were arrested in Malaysia in 2014,” the document stated.
As done in the previous two years (2012 and 2013), the State Department maintains that
the LTTE used “its international contacts and the large Tamil diaspora” in North America, Europe and Asia “to procure weapons, communications, funding, and other needed supplies.” The group employed charities as fronts to collect and divert funds for its activities, it adds.
