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.
SUPPORT: Elon Musk’s backing for the far-right AfD is also an implicit rebuke of center-right Christian Democratic Union leader Friedrich Merz, who is leading polls German Chancellor Olaf Scholz took a swipe at Elon Musk over his political judgement, escalating a spat between the German government and the world’s richest person. Scholz, speaking to reporters in Berlin on Friday, was asked about a post Musk made on his X platform earlier the same day asserting that only the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party “can save Germany.” “We have freedom of speech, and that also applies to multi-billionaires,” Scholz said alongside Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal. “But freedom of speech also means that you can say things that are not right and do not contain
FREEDOM NO MORE: Today, protests in Macau are just a memory after Beijing launched measures over the past few years that chilled free speech A decade ago, the elegant cobblestone streets of Macau’s Tap Seac Square were jam-packed with people clamouring for change and government accountability — the high-water mark for the former Portuguese colony’s political awakening. Now as Macau prepares to mark the 25th anniversary of its handover to China tomorrow, the territory’s democracy movement is all but over and the protests of 2014 no more than a memory. “Macau’s civil society is relatively docile and obedient, that’s the truth,” said Au Kam-san (歐錦新), 67, a schoolteacher who became one of Macau’s longest-serving pro-democracy legislators. “But if that were totally true, we wouldn’t
Two US Navy pilots were shot down yesterday over the Red Sea in an apparent “friendly fire” incident, the US military said, marking the most serious incident to threaten troops in over a year of US targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels. Both pilots were recovered alive after ejecting from their stricken aircraft, with one sustaining minor injuries. However, the shootdown underlines just how dangerous the Red Sea corridor has become over the ongoing attacks on shipping by the Iranian-backed Houthis despite US and European military coalitions patrolling the area. The US military had conducted airstrikes targeting Yemen’s Houthi rebels at the
MILITANTS TARGETED: The US said its forces had killed an IS leader in Deir Ezzor, as it increased its activities in the region following al-Assad’s overthrow Washington is scrapping a long-standing reward for the arrest of Syria’s new leader, a senior US diplomat said on Friday following “positive messages” from a first meeting that included a promise to fight terrorism. Barbara Leaf, Washington’s top diplomat for the Middle East, made the comments after her meeting with Ahmed al-Sharaa in Damascus — the first formal mission to Syria’s capital by US diplomats since the early days of Syria’s civil war. The lightning offensive that toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad on Dec. 8 was led by the Muslim Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is rooted in al-Qaeda’s
RSS