Free Republic

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — The Tamil Tigers admitted defeat Sunday in their fierce quarter-century war for a separate homeland as government forces raced to clear the last pockets of rebel resistance from the war zone in the north. Far from the battlefield, thousands of Sri Lankans danced in the streets of Colombo, celebrating the stunning collapse of one of the world's most sophisticated insurgencies. But with rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran still at large, the threat of renewed guerrilla warfare remained. Several rebel fighters committed suicide when they were surrounded, but it wasn't clear whether Prabhakaran or other leaders were...

The south east coast of Tamil Nadu was inhabited in pre-historic times mainly by Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids and Australoids rather than people similar to contemporary Tamils, a dental anthropological study has found. A team of anthropologists came to the finding after studying more than 1,000 teeth from Adichanallur's pre-historic harbour site on the south-east coast of Tamil Nadu that dates back to 2,500 BC... Optical microscope techniques were employed to study the teeth, which have shown the various growth stages, ageing and wearing processes, racial and ethnic and geographical affinities, dietary patterns, jaw mechanism, constitutional abnormalities of the jaws, pathological...

NEW DELHI: External affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee on Tuesday made it clear that India has no sympathy for LTTE, but said that civilian Tamils have to be prevented from becoming victims of the conflict in the island nation. "We are for the fight against terrorists and all sorts of terrorism. Therefore, we have no sympathy for any terrorist activity indulged in by any organization, particularly LTTE (which) is a banned organization in India," he told reporters ahead of his Sri Lanka visit. He made the remarks hours before his departure for Sri Lanka, where the government has claimed to have...

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....