by Stewart Bell | March 25, 2014 | Last Updated: Mar 25 8:39 PM ET
More from Stewart Bell | @StewartBellNP
AFP/Getty Images/FileA group of Tamil Tiger rebels return fire at Akkarayan, a village in Kilinochchi during a confrontation with the Sri Lankan army circa 2008.
TORONTO — Eight years after a group of Toronto men got caught buying arms for Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers, a New York court sentenced the last of them Tuesday to serve two years in prison.
Piratheepan “Peter” Nadarajah, 37, had pleaded guilty to his role in a Toronto-based smuggling ring that had attempted to acquire $1-million worth of missiles and AK-47 assault rifles for the Tamil rebels.
The former Rogers wireless technician, who came to Canada from Sri Lanka at age 14, had asked for 16 months — the time he had already spent behind bars in Canada and the United States.
“This was my fault, my mistake,” he wrote in a brief letter of apology to the U.S. federal judge ruling on his case. “Remorse has been carved in the depth of my heart. All I have left is to say sorry for this Your Honor.”
But the U.S. federal judge handed him a 24-month sentence, after which he will likely be deported back to Canada. He is the sixth Canadian to be imprisoned as a result of joint RCMP-FBI investigation into the North American support network that financed and supplied the Tamil Tigers.
The Tigers were separatist rebels who fought a lengthy civil war for independence on the small island in the Indian Ocean. Notorious for suicide bombings and assassinations, they were branded a terrorist group under Canadian and U.S. law.
Before they were defeated in 2009, the Tigers operated a front organization called the World Tamil Movement that opened offices in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver and raised vast sums of money for the rebel cause.
Acting under the direction of senior rebel leaders, a group of Canadians traveled to New York in 2006 to buy surface-to-air missiles that were to be shipped to the island and used to shoot down Sri Lankan fighter planes. But the conspirators ended up negotiating with an undercover FBI informant. Nadarajah was arrested by the RCMP in Toronto for his role.
www.telephonestogo.caPeter Nadarajah in an undated file photo.
After losing an appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, he was extradited to the United States in 2012 and pleaded guilty to two terrorism-related counts.
According to documents submitted by his lawyer, Nadarajah is the son of a Tamil convenience store owner whose shop was repeatedly burned down during the island’s ethnic unrest. When a rebel group threatened to kidnap him to extort money from his parents, Nadarajah was sent to Canada in 1990 to live with his brother.
He opened a Tamil movie rental store in Toronto in 1997 and worked at IBM and Bell Canada before joining Rogers in 2001, serving as head of fraud prevention, and then as a sales manager until leaving the company in 2010.
“He has been a dynamic and energetic social worker promoting peace and social welfare among communities in Toronto,” Karunarathna Paranawithana, the Sri Lankan Consul General in Toronto, wrote in one of the many letters of support filed in court.
In his two-page apology, Nadarajah said that following his arrest in 2006, his brother had attempted to travel to Canada to help him. He was waiting in line to buy a ticket on the ferry out of northern Sri Lanka when he was shot dead in an attack.
“My choice to help my friends and the LTTE killed my brother,” he wrote from the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I killed my brother. No form of punishment is as great as this. I live with this punishment every day.”
Defence lawyer Sam Schmidt argued that while Nadarajah had purchased cell phones for the Tamil Tigers in 2005, and the following year, after viewing “grisly and disturbing” photos of civilians killed by Sri Lankan forces, he had helped buy night vision goggles.
“He does not dispute that he assisted others who were long-time activists and supporters of LTTE to obtain night vision goggles and other such material for delivery to the LTTE,” Mr. Schmidt wrote in his sentencing submission. But he maintained that Nadarajah was not part of the more
serious missile plot.
Since the Tigers were decimated five years ago, there has been mounting international pressure for an investigation into allegations that Sri Lankan forces and Tamil rebels committed war crimes during the final months of the armed conflict. The United States is sponsoring a resolution before the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva this week that calls for an international probe of wartime abuses.
National Post
