Informed people have rejected an allegation raised by Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena that the now-defunct Tamil Tiger outfit had planned to attack Colombo with an aircraft flying from Chennai in 2009. 

Speaking to the Sri Lankan community in New York where he spoke at the UN General Assembly, Sirisena said, “No one knew it better than me.” 

Retired Indian military intelligence officer Colonel R. Hariharan was quoted in the local media on Saturday as dubbing the Sirisena claim as fiction. “The Chennai airport was fully secured and the Q branch of the Tamil Nadu police was on high alert,” he said. 

“They would have known had the LTTE hatched such a plan.” 

Hariharan now works with the Chennai centre for China studies and the international law and strategic analysis institute.

TR Baalu, prominent leader of the opposition DMK, who was a Union minister during the days Sirisena refers to, said: “What he says is totally baseless. How can he say either the Centre or the State government would have allowed our territory to be used to attack any other country?”

“There was no such plan of the LTTE, a banned organisation. It is totally false.” 

The DMK was in power in 2009.

Sri Lanka expert Prof PS Suryanarayana said, “It is wild imagination that the LTTE had plans to attack Colombo from Chennai.” 

Sirisena was the acting defence minister during the last two weeks of the civil war with the LTTE in May, 2009, when the Tigers were eliminated.

“The former president (Mahinda Rajapaksa) was away, the former prime minister was away. There was no defence ministry Secretary and Army Commander in the country at the time,” Sirisena said, adding that all senior leaders were out of the country fearing an LTTE air raid.

“The Tamil Tigers were going to operate an aircraft from Chennai or some other jungle area to bomb and destroy targets in Colombo,” the President said.

Sirisena said it was a well-guarded secret that all senior leaders were out of the country fearing an LTTE air raid. “Even I did not stay in Colombo. I was at several locations outside Colombo in case the Tigers attacked the capital city,” he said. (Gulf Today)