A United States judge has reduced the sentence handed down to three Tamils for allegedly conspiring to buy weapons for the LTTE due to the “injustice” of the case, reports the New York Daily News.
Federal Judge Raymond Dearie said that the case has “just taken over my head... To say that I’m troubled is to put it mildly”.
He went on to tell prosecutors and defence lawyers earlier this year:
“Now that we’ve become a little bit more sophisticated in our thinking about what is and is not terrorism, now that we know a lot more about the conflict in Sri Lanka and the horrors visited upon these people, perhaps there’s a way to provide a fair measure of justice to all without condemning these men to essentially a life behind bars”.
“I just believe in my heart of hearts that an injustice has been done and I can’t correct it,” he added.
His comments came after the accused trio, Sathajhan Sarachandran, Sahilal Sabaratnam, Thiruthanikan Thanigasalam, appealed the 2011 ruling and called for a reduction of their 25-year-sentence, describing the horrors of Sri Lankan military action in the Tamil North-East.
Amongst the incidents they had submitted to the judge was an incident where dozens of Tamil schoolchildren were killed in an airstrike by the Sri Lankan military. The three men were initially convicted of charges of conspiring to buy surface to air missiles on behalf of the LTTE. However, the LTTE’s military spokesman Rasiah Ilanthiraiyan told Reuters at the time, “We don’t have any connection with those people... It is not our way of operating”.
The three men have since reached a deal with the Brooklyn US Attorney’s office that will essentially calls for the dropping of the arms deal charge. However, they will still face a 15-year sentence for providing “material support” to the LTTE.
According to the US authorities, at a meeting in July 2005, one of the defendants also asked undercover American agents whether they “could stop the United States government from sending arms to the Sri Lankan government”.
Speaking on Judge Dearie’s ruling, lawyer Anthony Ricco said “it was an extraordinary measure by an extraordinary judge to repair something that everyone agrees was an injustice”.