Sri Lanka's Ministry of Defence rejected a media report in a Sinhala daily that the country has sent intelligence officers abroad as part of an operation against the LTTE, the Colombo Page reported.
Quoting the Secretary to the Ministry of Defence and Urban Development, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the newspaper yesterday reported that 18 Sri Lankan intelligence officers had been sent to 18 countries as part of an operation against 'LTTE organisations', a term often used by Sri Lankan ministers to refer to Tamil diaspora organisations.
The report comes after a Sri Lankan Muslim was arrested by police in Chennai earlier this week, accused of working for Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency and under the instructions of an officer within Pakistan's High Commission in Colombo.
The Ministry of Defence however rejected this, stating that no such comment was made.
"The Ministry of Defence and Urban Development categorically denies that Intelligence Officers [are] being sent to other countries to educate officials of those countries as part of an international operation," it said in a statement.
"The officials of the Ministry of Defense who visit relevant countries on official duties and diplomats of the Ministry of External Affairs have educated relevant authorities in respective countries about the threats posed by those organizations and persons listed in recent gazette notification that listed the organizations," the statement went on to say.
In 2012, Col. Parithi, or Mathinthiran Nadarajah, the leader of the Tamil Coordinating Committee (TCC) in Paris, was shot dead in Paris as he left the TCC office. The French newspaper le Parisien reported that the suspect who was detained by French police a few days later in connection with the murder, claimed to have been offered a 50,000 Euros award and a Sri Lankan passport by an associate of the Sri Lankan Embassy in France for the murder.
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