Terming it a “big scam”, the extended family of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) chief Velupillai Prabhakaran has urged all Tamils in India and across the world not to fall into the trap of certain elements in the diaspora fraternity who are collecting millions of dollars by saying that the slain Tamil leader is still alive.
Karthik Manoharan, son of Prabhakaran’s elder brother Velupillai Manoharan, told IANS that a “mafia gang” is active on a large scale which wants to use Prabhakaran as a “brand name” and collect money from Tamils living across the world.
V. Prabhakaran was assassinated in the final stages of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long bloody war against the LTTE, which was crushed by Sri Lankan security forces in May 2009.
“The dead should be given due respect. Any single penny paid to the gang of fraudsters claiming that Prabhakaran is alive will not go to his family or the poor and suffering Tamils in war-torn Sri Lanka but will go into their pockets,” said Karthik, 43, nephew of the late LTTE supreme leader.
Terming the alleged imposters as “liars”, Karthik named some Indian Tamil leaders and Sri Lankan-born Tamil Eelam propagandists who had campaigned for the revival of his deceased uncle Prabhakaran and his only daughter Dwaraka Prabhakaran.
Manoharan’s family has maintained a very low profile since leaving Sri Lanka in 1983. They finally broke their silence when some expatriate groups in Switzerland staged a mock play with an AI-manipulated video speech of Dwaraka Prabhakaran on ‘Maaveerar Naal’ or ‘Great Hero Day’ on November 27, 2023.
The nephew said, “We have to put an end to this nonsense. My uncle was killed in the final stages of the war along with his entire family. This has been confirmed and if any of them were alive they would have contacted us as we were all very close to each other and they would call us from Sri Lanka.”
He said his family’s last conversation with Prabhakaran took place in 2008, a year before the war ended.
“My uncle, in what turned out to be his last call, said the situation in Sri Lanka was very bad,” Karthik said.
Prabhakaran’s parents were taken to India along with the rest of the family by Karthik’s father Manoharan in 1983 when ethnic war broke out in Sri Lanka and the army was searching for the LTTE leader.
The family lived in Tamil Nadu for 13 years until 1998 and then moved to Denmark through a United Nations agency.
“My father was planning to start a business in India but then Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated and my uncle was suspected of it. So my father was asked to leave India,” the Tamil rebel leader’s nephew told IANS.
The family later approached the UNHCR and moved to the Scandinavian country in 1996, which was the first to accept their plea.
However, Karthik said that since the family was related to the LTTE leader, they were “ill-treated” by some expatriate groups in Denmark who were collecting funds in the name of the rebel movement.
“We were branded as RAW agents because we were from India,” Karthik said, expressing gratitude to the Indian government for allowing the family to stay in the country for over a decade.
Karthik initially believed that his grandparents had also been killed in the final days of the war in May 2009. The family later learnt that they were alive and were kept in an army camp until his grandfather’s death was announced in 2010. Prabhakaran’s mother also died later.
One of Karthik’s aunts (Prabhakaran’s sister) still lives in India with her family, while the other lives in Canada.
However, he said the extended family still cannot meet each other or travel due to multiple visa issues and the fear of not being able to return.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
