Malaysia said it has arrested and deported several leaders of the Sri Lankan separatist Tamil Tiger rebels over the past few months to prevent them setting up a hub in the country.
Malaysian Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said in a statement late on Thursday he had informed Sri Lanka of the action against the unnamed leaders of the Tigers between August and March.
“We did not want them here any longer than necessary,” Fuzi Harun, the director of Malaysia’s federal special operations force, was quoted as saying in the New Straits Times yesterday.
“Our preventive action was to stop them from turning the country into their hub or base for global terrorist operations,” he said.
Officials declined to give information about the identity of those arrested or how many.
Hishammuddin said Sri Lankan Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa “very much appreciated” the arrests. Hishammuddin informed him about the arrests at a defense exhibition in Kuala Lumpur this week, the statement said.
Sri Lanka’s military defeated the Tamil Tigers last year after 25 years of civil war. Top rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was slain, and remaining leaders went into hiding.
Malaysia has a sizable ethnic Tamil population, many of whom sympathize with the Tamil Tigers who wanted to carve out an independent nation for the Tamil minority in Sinhalese-majority Sri Lanka’s north.
Major-General G.V.D.U.A. Perera, the deputy commissioner at the Sri Lanka High Commission, or embassy, declined to comment on the Malaysian statement.
A Malaysian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on this matter, said all the arrested Tamils have been deported. Among them was a top leader but he could not name him, he said.
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