COUNTERTERRORISM BLOG SAYS TAMIL TIGERS SUPPLIED FORGED PASSPORTS TO THE NOTORIOUS WORLD TRADE CENTER KILLER RAMZI YOUSEF WHO WAS CONVICTED

By Walter Jayawardhana

Photo of the notorious World Trade Center bomber who received forged passports from LTTE

Commenting on the news story about the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) stealing Norwegian passports and selling them to Al Queda affiliates filed by this correspondent Aaron Mannes , a counter terrorism expert said it was the LTTE who also supplied forged passports to the notorious terrorist Ramzi Yousef who bombed the World Trade Center .

Mannes said in his commentary , published in the Counterterrorism Blog quoting Rohan Gunaratne, that the Sri Lankan terrorist group not only supplied the forged passports to Ramzi Yousef it also smuggled weapons from Pakistan’s Islamist militants to their counterparts in Philippines.

Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 bombing at New York's World Trade Center, was sentenced to a jail term of 240 years without parole and spending his time in a US federal jail right now. The attack killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

After three days of deliberation in 1996, a federal jury convicted Yousef and Eyad Ismoil on murder and conspiracy charges for their roles in a plot by Islamic extremists to topple the trade center's two 110-story towers to punish the United States for its support of Israel. Yousef also has been implicated in bombing in a Japanese air plane and series of other terrorist activities connected with Al Queda activities including those in the Philippines.

Writing further in the blog Mannes said, “The LTTE has an international network of support among the Tamil diaspora and, because of Sri Lanka's strategic location astride shipping lanes, it owns fleet of sea-going vessels. So it is well positioned to play a role in trans-national criminal activity.

The passport sales only highlights how terrorism is the tip of the iceberg of trans-national threats.”
Mannes further wrote: “In the past I've written that the U.S. should expand its efforts against the LTTE because it was morally consistent with targeting terrorists, it would contribute to stability on the Indian-subcontinent, and because the LTTE was embedded in international criminal networks that also service Islamist terrorists. It would appear, based on some high profiles arrests of LTTE operatives in the U.S. that this has happened.”