Former LTTE deputy leader Gopalaswamy Mahendrarajah alias Mahattaya was a RAW agent, recruited as early as 1989, a new book has claimed.

Journalist Neena Gopal, who interviewed former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi moments before he was assassinated in 1991, says that Mahattaya was a Research and Analysis Wing mole, IANS reported.

"The man was cultivated and positioned by RAW as their mole inside Prabharkaran's hitherto impenetrable ranks as early as 1989," she says in her book "The Assassination of Rajiv Gandhi" (Penguin).

"He would become their deep asset, the one who would subvert the insurgent movement from the inside, and had been tasked to eliminate Prabhakaran and take over the LTTE," the book says.

RAW's links with Mahattaya, who the LTTE later executed on charges of being an Indian intelligence agent, was not known to the Indian Military Intelligence or the Intelligence Bureau, the book also says.

The LTTE reportedly suspected that it was Mahattaya who tipped off the Indians about a Tamil Tiger ship in January 1993, leading to the death of former Jaffna LTTE commander Kittu, a childhood friend of Prabhakaran.

According to the book, Mahattaya was reportedly seized by the LTTE and taken to a camp where he was "tortured over a period of several weeks and months until he could barely speak, sit or stand.

"He was finally executed in December 1994, 19 months (later). Some 257 of his men were executed and their bodies dumped, LTTE style, in a pit and set on fire."

Despite the RAW's covert penetration of the LTTE, the Indian military, civilian intelligence and its diplomats worked at cross-purposes when the Indian military was deployed in Sri Lanka's northeast in 1987-90, the book says.

The Sri Lankan military finally crushed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) in May 2009, leaving thousands dead in the final months of a brutal conflict that began some 30 years earlier.

(With inputs from IANS)