Free Republic

From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu T.S. Subramanian Strong resemblances between graffiti symbols in Tamil Nadu and the Indus script Continuity of tradition: Megalithic pots with arrow-work graffiti found at Sembiankandiyur village in Nagapattinam district. CHENNAI: In recent excavations in Nagapattinam district in Tamil Nadu, megalithic pottery with graffiti symbols that have a strong resemblance to a sign in the Indus script have been found. Indus script expert Iravatham Mahadevan says that what is striking about the arrow-mark graffiti on the megalithic pottery found at Sembiyankandiyur and Melaperumpallam villages is that they are always incised twice and together, just...

The Oslo Police District is snowed under by the sheer number of criminal cases in the capital, and only 21 percent of reported offenses were handled last year. Investigators claim they don't have the time, staffing or resources to cope with their workload. More than 10,000 cases remained in the legal queue in Oslo when 2007 came to a close. "This is unfortunate for the credibility of and confidence in the police," said Oslo district chief public prosecutor Morten Yggeseth. He added that this trend has significance for the country’s security. Oslo Police District Union leader Jan Olav Frantsvold said...

CHENNAI: A broken storage jar with inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi script has been excavated at Quseir-al-Qadim, an ancient port with a Roman settlement on the Red Sea coast of Egypt. This Tamil Brahmi script has been dated to first century B.C. One expert described this as an “exciting discovery.” The same inscription is incised twice on the opposite sides of the jar. The inscription reads paanai oRi, that is, pot (suspended) in a rope net. An archaeological team belonging to the University of Southampton in the U.K., comprising Prof. D. Peacock and Dr. L. Blue, who recently re-opened excavations at...

Sri Lankan fighter jets bombed a secret rebel communications center early yesterday, killing the Tamil Tigers' political chief and five others in a strike expected to deal a sharp blow to the guerrillas' morale. The killing of S.P. Tamilselvan, who acted as the public face of the rebels, was widely seen as a public relations coup for the government. But analysts feared it would further escalate the more than two-decade-old civil war and spark a cycle of political assassinations across this Indian Ocean island nation. "This is a message that we know their leaders' location," Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa said....

Thailand has arrested the finance chief of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, allegedly the group's chief procurer of arms. Kumaran Pathmanadan is reported to have been arrested by police in Bangkok on Monday evening. He is one of the top officials in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the formal name of the group. Pathmanadan apparently had obtained Thai citizenship. He continued to run the global network of LTTE offices and its weapons procurement, logistics and money laundering operations. He has been on Interpol's Most Wanted list for a number of years. He has also been implicated in several...

Oslo, 16 August, (Asiantribune.com): With 33 witnesses and three injured victims in hospital, the Norwegian Police is nowhere near to any arrest of the Tamil criminals who went on a violent rampage in Oslo last Sunday. In broad daylight Tamils ran amok hacking their rivals with a samurai sword, shooting another and running a car over third Tamil. The police are now complaining about a lack of information from the Tamil public. The head of the police investigation team, Finn Abrahamsen has had meetings with the Norwegian LTTE leader Yogarajah Balasingham on Tuesday. Balasingham has promised to co-operate with the...

The Sri Lankan military say they have taken what they are calling the last Tamil Tiger rebel stronghold in the east of the country. A spokesman said troops had re-taken the rugged area of Thoppigala in the district of Batticaloa, which has been in rebel hands for years. The Tamil Tigers still control large swathes of the island's north. Speaking to the BBC in their stronghold at Killinochchi, the rebels admitted the army was now dominant in the east... Correspondents say that the fall of Thoppigala gives the government control over the entire eastern province for the first time...

Tigers exploit flaws in Lankan air defence PK Balachandran, Hindustan Times Colombo, April 30, 2007 They are like David and Goliath. The Sri Lankan Air Force (SLAF) has a fair sized fleet of Kfir, MIG 27 and Y-8 bombers, MI-17 and MI-24 choppers, and AN-32 transport aircraft. In contrast, the LTTE's air arm, christened Tamileelam Air Force (TUF), is a puny, single digit fleet of propeller-driven and locally assembled Zlin Z-142s of Czech design. And yet, the fledgling Flying Tigers have been able to infiltrate hundreds of kilometres of government-held territory, attack key military and strategic targets, and get back...

The inscriptions on the pillars belong to the Pallava period of 8th century A.D. when Thirukin Kizhavar was the local chieftain, the Pallava period of early 9th century A.D. when Nripatunga Varman was the ruler, and 998 A.D. when Raja Raja Chola was in his 13th regnal year. The inscriptions, in Tamil, are about the donation of gold and land for the temple and the maintenance of its perpetual lamp at Thiruvizhchil, which is present-day Salavankuppam. There is an inscription of Raja Raja Chola on the floor near the entrance to the Shore Temple. He built the Brihadisvara temple in...

A federal judge has ruled that a portion of a post-Sept. 11 executive order allowing President Bush to create a list of specially designated global terrorist groups is unconstitutionally vague. U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins, in a Nov. 21 ruling released Tuesday, struck down the provision and enjoined the government from blocking the assets of two foreign groups which were placed on the list. The ruling was praised by David Cole, a lawyer for the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Constitutional Rights. "This law gave the president unfettered authority to create blacklists," he said. "It was reminiscent of the McCarthy era."...

ALARM - Sri Lanka: "vast offensive" of the army COLOMBO - the Sri Lankian army launched Wednesday a "vast offensive" against the rebellion tamoule in the septentrional peninsula of Jaffna, announced the guerrilla.

Chicago congressman Danny Davis and an aide took a trip to Sri Lanka last year that was paid for by the Tamil Tigers, a group that the U.S. government has designated as a terrorist organization for its use of suicide bombers and child soldiers, law-enforcement sources said

There are now seven Tamil-Canadians accused of trying to obtain weapons on behalf of the Tamil Tigers rebel group in Sri Lanka, according to a report. Police say a man detained in the U.S. earlier this week has now been identified as Canadian, bringing the total to seven Tamil-Canadians suspected of supporting the rebel group, the Toronto Star reported Friday. U.S. authorities allege Thirukumaran Sinnathamby "used his bank account to launder funds from the LTTE" also known as the Tamil Tigers, which is on Canada's list of terror groups, and helped some of his co-accused to buy technology. He is...

NEW DELHI (CNS) -- Amid battles between Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and government forces in northern Sri Lanka, a parish priest and a person traveling with him have disappeared. Father Thiruchelvam Nihal Jim Brown, 34, of St. Philip Neri Church in Allaipiddy off the Jaffna peninsula disappeared Aug. 20 after he and Wenceslaus Vincent Vimalan went to the church to check the premises. The church and the predominantly Catholic neighborhood -- about six miles from downtown Jaffna -- have been virtually abandoned since the church was shelled Aug. 13. "We are very worried as there has been no trace...

A unique Tamil-Brahmi Inscription on pottery of the second century AD has recently been excavated in Thailand. A Thai-French team of archaeologists, led by Dr. Bérénice Bellina of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France, and Praon Silpanth, Lecturer, Silpakorn University, Thailand, has discovered a sherd of inscribed pottery during their current excavations at Phu Khao Thong in Thailand.

NEW DELHI: A Sri Lankan Tamil girl who braved choppy seas for five long hours to flee to India is making waves with her two parrots, but cats at the refugee camp are posing fresh threats to her pets and giving her sleepless nights. Like thousands of others before her, Nishanthini Lombert, 15, came to Tamil Nadu, crossing the rough sea dividing the two countries in a fishing vessel that was packed with 18 people and battered suitcases with their belongings. The group included her parents and three brothers and the birds, which were put into a cardboard box to...

The discovery of a Neolithic stone celt, a hand-held axe, with the Indus script on it at Sembian-Kandiyur in Tamil Nadu is, according to Iravatham Mahadevan, "a major discovery because for the first time a text in the Indus script has been found in the State on a datable artefact, which is a polished neolithic celt." He added: "This confirms that the Neolithic people of Tamil Nadu shared the same language family of the Harappan group, which can only be Dravidian. The discovery provides the first evidence that the Neolithic people of the Tamil country spoke a Dravidian language." Mr....

The earliest settlement in the subcontinent with evidence of agriculture and domestication at Mehrgarh — now in Pakistan — is about 9,000 years old. This coincides with the peak intensification of the monsoon, the study said... The Arabian Sea sediments and other geological studies show that the monsoon began to weaken about 5,000 years ago. The dry spell, lasting several hundred years, might have led people to abandon the Indus cities and move eastward into the Gangetic plain, which has been an area of higher rainfall than the northwestern part of the subcontinent... About 1,700 years ago, the monsoon began...

In ancient India, scholars used to pass on traditional knowledge orally down the generations. Later on, a written tradition also existed using a variety of writing media from granite slabs to copper plates, tree barks and most importantly palm leaves. The manuscripts chiefly written in three different scripts called the Tamil Brahmi, Vatteluttu and Drantha scripts are treasure troves holding answers to the age-old era. The National Mission for Manuscripts, the federal Ministry of Culture department together with the state's Development, Culture and Religious Endowment department have started a survey aimed at locating and documenting such historical manuscripts possessing literary,...

A Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka, who heads a religious party opposed to a Tamil homeland in the north and east, says the country would be better off if the reclusive rebel leader of the Tamil Tigers were dead. Venerable Ellawala Medhananda, head of the National Heritage Party, or Jathika Hela Urumaya, said the government should be prepared to fight the rebels, led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, to the bitter end if peace talks in Switzerland next week fail. "If Prabhakaran is dead, Sri Lanka is a better place," he told Reuters in an interview at a Buddhist center in the...

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) -- Police say Sri Lanka's foreign minister has died after being shot near his home in Colombo.

A man wielding a Samurai sword killed a woman and injured three other people in a "bloodbath" in a German church on Sunday, police in the south-western city of Stuttgart said. "The 25-year-old perpetrator wrought a bloodbath in the church," Michael Kuehner said, deputy chief of police in Stuttgart. "He thrust about himself with a Samurai sword and struck out at random at the people in his way." Police told a news conference a 43-year-old woman died in the attack. They had originally identified the deceased as a man. A man and a woman were also seriously injured and another...

LTTE terror stalks Australian media Melbourne, 30 January: The Melbourne-based office of the Serendib - a nation-wide community newspaper for Sri Lankans in Australia - was vandalized and three laptops, three PCs, CDs on which the backup information was stored were removed on Friday night(28). This vandalizing was aimed at crippling the production of this monthly. The raid on the Serendib office occurred after the latest January issue carried an interview with Sri Lanka's High Commissioner, Maj-Gen. Janaka Perera. In it the High Commissioner exposed the false propaganda of the agents of the LTTE in Australia accusing the Sri Lankan...

COLOMBO (AFP) - The Indian Ocean tsunamis killed 31,000 people in Sri Lanka and caused unprecedented damage, but were also a blessing to its economy which had been heading for a major catastrophe, according to analysts. A record trade deficit, balance of payment crisis driven by high crude oil prices, galloping inflation and an uncertain political climate due to tension between the government and Tiger rebels, had pushed the economy to crisis point. The December 26 tsunamis destroyed three-quarters of the country's coastline, wrecked the road and railway network and initially left a million people homeless, but there followed an...

LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran Saturday ended four weeks of speculation about his whereabouts by surfacing to meet a Norwegian delegation led by Foreign Minister Jan Petersen. "I met with him. Obviously, he is alive," Petersen told journalists after conferring with Prabhakaran at the LTTE’s Kilinochchi headquarters. He also said that talks had focused around relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts in the aftermath of last month’s tsunami disaster. Petersen was accompanied by Norwegian Minister for International Development Hilde Johnson. Deputy Foreign Minister Vidar Helgesen and special envoy Erik Solheim are also in the country. Prabhakaran’s failure to appear in public after...

The manager of a Hindu monastery in India's Tamil Nadu state has been found dead with stab wounds, police say. The body of Srinivasachar was found in a pool of blood in the 150-year-old Uttaradi Mutt in the southern town of Kanchipuram on Thursday, reports say. Kanchipuram has been rocked by the arrests of two Hindu religious leaders belonging to another monastery, who are charged with murdering a former aide. Police have so far not commented on how Srinivasachar, 40, might have died. There is no indication the discovery of the body on Thursday is in any way linked to...

It’s a request from Norway--which has been trying to negotiate a peace deal in Sri Lanka’s longtime civil war--keeping Canada from adding the Tamil Tigers to its list of banned terrorist organizations. That’s the latest discovery of the Tiger Tamil-tracking National Post. Norway has supposedly been working on the Sri Lankan peace deal for the past three years. That timeline includes the summer of 2003 when former Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland, in her capacity as director general of the World Health Organization (WHO) blacklisted the City of Toronto as a travel destination in the WHO-over hyped SARS scare. The...

Rightwing groups oppose prayer meeting by Pastor Benny Hinn, whom they accuse of coming to India to convert.Bangalore (AsiaNews) – Hindu extremist groups have threatened the Prayer for India Meeting. Representatives of the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council or VHP) accuse US preacher Benny Hinn of planning to convert Hindus and threaten the government that they will send their own activists if the meeting is not stopped. Pramod Mutalik, the VHP’s regional secretary, said “the VHP and Bajrang Dal have given the government an ultimatum that ends today to impose a ban on the event. If...

A new ruse has been adopted by the LTTE to increase its income through so-called contributions from Tamil living abroad. Using the tsunami disaster as an excuse the organisation is sending some of its chosen benefactors to mainly Western industrial countries on the bogus grounds that they had lost all their possessions and were left helpless. Informed sources in Divisional Secretariats, in the coastal areas around Colombo, said certain individuals, who were seeking refugee status in countries in the West were paying as much as 10,000 rupee in bribes to Grama Niladharis to obtain certificates that their homes and belongings...

Tsunami orphans getting recruited by Terror Organizations and relief aids not reaching those who need the same in Sri Lanka and Acheh UNICEF reported a very disturbing information. According to a report, UNICEF complained that Tamil Tigers are recruiting innocent orphaned children, victims of tsunami, into the terror camps. Similar reports are coming from Sumatra. In Acheh and other parts of Indonesia, the terrorists and the human traffickers are also targeting the children. The Indonesian Government today asked all foreign military personnel leave no later than March, 2005. In Sri Lanka, there are some major problems. Tamil Tigers control the...

People from hardest-hit areas in ‘Black Sunday’ deplore attempts to snatch children left on their own.Nagapattinam (AsiaNews) – The situation of tsunami orphans is getting worse by the day because of the constant presence of not always disinterested outsiders. Eyewitnesses told AsiaNews stories about people approaching parents or the children themselves in refugee camps and villages in violation of Indian and international adoption laws. A resident of Nagapattinam, a village in Tamil Nadu, said: “Some people coming from Salem, from Coimbatore, have demanded to take away the children. We do not let them go”. Two tsunami survivors, Parmeshwaram and his...

No one should have been surprised that the same Tamils who supply guns to terrorists are collecting money in Canada for the tsunami victims of South Asia. Long before devastating tsunami waves claimed tens of thousands of souls in Sri Lanka, the Canadian Liberal government had established a record for being soft on Tamil Tiger fundraising. Both Prime Minister Paul Martin when he was Minister of Finance and Member of Parliament Maria Minna attended a May 2000, $600-a-plate fund raising dinner organized by a front organization for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Genial dinner hosts to Martin and Minna,...

COLOMBO : Elusive Tamil Tiger chief Velupillai Prabhakaran and his intelligence chief Pottu Amman are among the dead or missing after last week's tsunami disaster, state radio said Saturday, sparking fresh tension between government and rebels who immediately denied the report. The Island newspaper, meanwhile, reported Saturday that an expensive coffin "for a top LTTE leader" had been smuggled into a northern Tiger area inside a container carrying relief for tsunami survivors. The LTTE, in a statement posted on its official Peace Secretariat website, slammed the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation for carrying the reports, saying now was "not the...

Disaster opens prospect of peace in Sri Lanka When Sri Lanka’s president Chandrika Kumaratunga shook hands with two Tamil Tiger guerrillas last week, many saw her gesture as a symbol of peacemaking following the tsunami that has killed more than 30,000 across the island. Ms Kumaratunga, who lost an eye in 1999 in a Tiger assassination attempt during the group’s insurgency for a Tamil homeland, also declared that returning to civil war with the Tigers was now only a “remote” possibility. Underlying Ms Kumaratunga’s bold declaration were the heavy losses suffered by the Tigers due to the tsunami in territory...

Whatever study has been made so far of the Tamil texts side by side with comparable data available in Strabo, Pliny, the Periplus Maris Erythraei and Ptolomey, and with the archaeological and numismatic finds in Southern India, has shown that the Tamil texts contain illuminating corroborative evidence. Discussions of Roman Tamil trade made by Jean Filliozat, Mortimer Wheeler, Pierre Meile, E.H. Warmington and M.P. Charlesworth have taken into consideration the tests interpreted by V. Kangasabai Pillai in his book the "Tamils one thousand eight hundred years Ago". 1904.

Skeletons, script found at ancient burial site in Tamil Nadu By T.S. Subramanian An urn containing a human skull and bones unearthed by the Archaeological Survey of India at Adhichanallur, near Tirunelveli town in Tamil Nadu. Twelve of these urns (below) contain human skeletons. Three of them, which may be 2,800 years old, bear inscriptions that resemble the early Tamil Brahmi script. -- Photos: A. Shaikmohideen CHENNAI, MAY 25. In spectacular finds, the Archaeological Survey of India, Chennai Circle, has unearthed a dozen 2,800-year-old human skeletons intact in urns at Adichanallur, 24 km from Tirunelveli in Tamil Nadu. Three of...

<p>COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The first direct talks between Sri Lanka's president and prime minister since their power struggle erupted into a political crisis last week ended yesterday without a breakthrough, an official at the prime minister's office said.</p> <p>President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe met for two hours for the first time since Nov. 4, when Mrs. Kumaratunga seized control of the ministries of defense, interior and media and temporarily closed Parliament, claiming Mr. Wickremesinghe had made too many concessions to the Tamil rebels.</p>

HE WANNI, Sri Lanka — Inside the Kantharuban Arivuchcholai orphanage, which is set in a clearing hacked from the jungle's oppressive vegetation, sits a small painted hut, a mini-museum of sorts. Inside it is a picture of Kantharuban, who blew himself up in 1991. There is a picture of Captain Millar, who blew himself up in 1987. There is a picture of 12 cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who swallowed cyanide capsules after capture by Indian troops in 1987. Eleven-year-old Rajani, who calls the orphanage home, knows them all. He knows that Kantharuban, an orphan like him,...

Of lasting genes and lost cities of Tamil Nadu Papri Sri Raman (Indo-Asian News Service) Chennai, January 5 India's East Coast, especially along Tamil Nadu, is increasingly drawing the attention of archaeologists and anthropologists from across the world for its evolutionary and historical secrets. The focus has sharpened after genetic scientist Spencer Wells found strains of genes in some communities of Tamil Nadu that were present in the early man of Africa. In the "Journey of Man" aired by the National Geographic channel, Wells says the first wave of migration of early man from Africa took place 60,000 years ago...