Justice triumphs

As security arrangements around the court when the verdict was delivered show, extraordinary precautions were required throughout the last six years of investigation and prosecution in court. With the LTTE, the SIT was up against one of the most resourceful and ruthless organisations in the world which demands and receives extreme, almost grotesque, loyalty from its cadres and has few equals in its ability to manipulate its sympathisers. Even now, six years on, the detailed planning for the assassination with safe houses in Tamil Nadu, exploratory planning as far afield as Delhi, a trained stand-by assassin in case Dhanu failed, the dry-run for the assassination during V. P. Singh’s public meeting ten days earlier, all make for a bone-chilling narrative. Painstaking work of a high order was required to crack the case and even that would not have been enough without several lucky breaks which occurred in the course of investigation. It needs to be acknowledgedthat despite political controversy surrounding the case from start to finish, those in charge of it did not allow themselves to be influenced one way or another and, in the end, managed to present water-tight evidence before the court. Furthermore, neither maximum security arrangements nor the pressure of public opinion prevented the accused from getting a fair trial. The message from this phase of the trial and sentencing is that the law is supreme and neither politics nor terrorism can stop its course.

Any political options Prabakaran may have toyed with are being foreclosed. India has declared him an offender and asked Colombo to extradite him. In Sri Lanka, following the bomb blast at the holiest of Buddhist sites in Kandy, the LTTE has been banned and his arrest ordered by the courts. Wanted by the authorities in both countries on criminal counts, it is unlikely he will ever again be able to find the door open to a negotiated settlement.