He is known as KP, and he runs a shadowy smuggling network that stretches from the skyscrapers of New York to the suicide bomber training camps of Sri Lanka. With a medium build, a moustache, slight paunch and thinning hair, the 52-year-old man blends easily in Thailand, Indonesia, Bulgaria and South Africa, from where he buys weapons for Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tiger rebels. He operates right under the nose of the West, which experts say is so preoccupied with the al-Qaeda that it largely ignores other terrorist groups.In dozens of interviews with Sri Lankan officials, Western diplomats and former rebels, The Associated Press found that the Tigers raise US$200 million to US$300 million a year, mostly through extortion and fraud. They then use front companies or middlemen to buy arms from legitimate weapons makers in Europe and Asia. They move the weapons back to Sri Lanka on their own ships, all to continue their 24-year-long fight to create a homeland for the Tamil minority.The Tigers’ success in arming a 10,000-strong force has come into sharp focus in the past year with the resumption of full-scale civil war in Sri Lanka and a broadening investigation into alleged Tiger operatives in New York.The investigation offers a glimpse of the Tigers’ methods and reach. More than a dozen suspects have been arrested for allegedly plotting to loot ATM machines and bribe US officials to drop the Tigers from Washington’s list of terror groups.One suspect once worked for Microsoft Corp and allegedly helped the Tigers buy computers, according to court papers. Another suspect arrested in Indonesia was caught with a laptop that had spreadsheets detailing more than US$13 million in payments in 2006 for military equipment, including anti-aircraft guns and 100 tonnes of high explosives, court papers say. His passport showed more than 100 trips in the past five years to countries such as China, Kenya and even Sri Lanka.Authorities are also looking into the dealings of a Wall Street financier suspected of donating millions of dollars to the rebels, say officials. He is identified as “Individual B” in court papers and has not been arrested.International efforts were supposed to shut down such operations after the September 11 attacks, but experts on terrorist financing say the Tigers’ network has thrived in the past six years.“After 9/11, the know-your-client principle was supposed to be integrated into the financial markets and into pretty much every business,” said Shanaka Jayasekra, a terrorism expert at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. The Tigers are “showing what can be done to exploit the holes in this system”.Sri Lanka has stepped up its efforts to cut off rebel supply lines in a war that has killed 70,000 people over the past 24 years. Its navy has sunk seven insurgent ships in the last year, and several Tiger operatives in the US, Europe and Australia have been arrested. But Sri Lanka’s resources are limited, as is the interest of the West.“No one is paying a bloody bit of attention to any other group” apart from al-Qaeda, especially one like the Tigers, whose fight is in a single, relatively poor country with little international clout, said Peter Chalk of the Rand Corp, a US think tank.Outside Sri Lanka, the Tigers’ network relies heavily on the Tamil diaspora, which has swelled to between 600,000 and 800,000. The bulk of their money comes from large and lucrative communities of Tamils abroad — more than 200,000 in Canada, about 110,000 in Britain, others in Western Europe, Australia and the United States.
