CLASSIFIED | POLITICS | TERRORISM | OPINION | VIEWS

ARMY CONTINUE TO FIND LARGE CACHES OF WEAPONS AND AMMUNITION INCLUDING ANTI-AIRCRAFT MISSILE

By Walter Jayawardhana

The Sri Lankan military websites have published photos of hundreds of weapons including an anti-aircraft missile and guns that have been hidden in caves and shrubs by fleeing cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) when they finally abandoned the Thoppigala jungles and took to their heels along numerous jungle footpaths to Wanni.

The Thoppigala jungles, which they have been occupying for over a decade finally fell to the land forces of the Sri Lanka Army and the elite commando forces of the Police, but not to the appreciation of all sections of the Southern polity of the country.

The country’s leader of opposition with the intention of playing down the military establishment led by the Defense Secretary and President’s brother Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, at public meetings said it was nothing to crow about since it was a jungle despite the fact what fell out of the hands of the Tamil Tigers was the last bastion of the separatist group in the strategic Eastern Province , which they considered an intergral part of their mono ethnic putative state of Eelam in which they had tried what human rights activists in the past termed ethnic cleansing. The non Tamils , consisting of the Sinhalese and Muslims in the province combined made a majority to the Tamils whose full fledged support was also lost by the Tigers in the later stages.

The opposition Leaders party , the United National Party , later came out with so far unsubstantiated charges, that the government , due to a “secret pact” allowed the Tamil Tigers to escape to the adjacent Wanni stronghold of theirs with all the heavy weapons. In the midst of such allegations the large recoveries of LTTE arms , some stashed away under the brush, some carefully greased and wrapped in polythene and buried and others carefully stored in cavernous caves were god given to show the world that the politician who was devaluing their hard won victory was not to be taken seriously.

An anti-aircraft gun, a surface-to-air missile, 1,150 mortar shells, 59 roadside bombs and 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of TNT and C4 explosives , 172 T56 guns 25 machine guns , a multi purpose machine gun and 2000 pieces of T56 ammunition and numerous other heavy machine guns, pressure mines, ammunition and grenade launchers that were enough to take a whole army were found since last Monday.

"This is one of the biggest recoveries in the east," Brigadier Prasad Samarasinghe , the military spokesman was gloating over the cache.

Until the military caught Thoppigala it was kept as the LTTE’s jungle hide out , supported by a Ceasefire Agreement entered into by Tiger leader Prabhakaran and Opposition leader Wickremesinghe , that enabled the rebel group to send its suicide bombers and Claymore mines all over the country.

The rebel group kept the jungles for 13 years before they finally fled. The finds came from Thoppigala, Motagala, Meeyanagolla, Thihiliveddi and Aliya Oddi all adjacent to each other, a vast area of rocks and brush as big as the Colombo District. The military said they are continuing to search the area for more weapons and ammunition.

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