Who was Prabhakaran? Dreaded LTTE chief and mastermind of ex-India PM Rajiv Gandhi assassination

India.com

08-07-2025

LTTE founder Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed on May 18, 2009. (File)
Velupillai Prabhakaran, the notorious leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), who masterminded the shocking assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, is regarded as one of the most infamous yet influential insurgents in the last 50 years. The 54-year-old who was reportedly killed by Sri Lankan forces on May 18, 2009, led a decades-long insurgency that transformed the serene island nation into a warzone in which hundreds of thousands were killed, maimed and injured, and millions displaced. Who was Prabhakaran?
Born into a middle-class family in Valvettiturai, a fishing town on the northern coast of Sri Lanka's Jaffna peninsula, Prabhakaran was the youngest of four children, however, not much is known about his early life. 'My childhood was spent in the small circle of a lonely, quiet house,' Prabhakaran had said in a 1994 interview.
In the interview, the slain LTTE chief revealed that his deep-seated anger against the military as he recalled a teacher in his middle school extorting students to take up arms against the violence perpetrated against the ethnic Tamilians by the state. 'It is he who impressed on me the need for armed struggle and persuaded me to put my trust in it.'
At the time, Jaffna was considered the heart of Tamilian culture and literature in Sri Lanka, and soon emerged as the center of the growing Tamil nationalist movement, which demanded greater autonomy for Tamil-majority areas to protest against the alleged discrimination against Tamils by Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority. How Prabhakaran emerged as the leader of LTTE?
In 1975, Prabhakaran emerged as one of the faces of Tamil New Tigers– the predecessor of the LTTE– after the group claimed responsibility for the assassination of Alfred Duraiappah, the then mayor of Jaffna city. A year later, Prabhakaran established the LTTE, a guerilla movement which later evolved into a full-scale civil war in 1983, when the group ambushed and killed 13 Sri Lankan army troops in Jaffna.
In retaliation, more than 3,000 Tamils, mainly in Colombo, were killed in wanton violence that lasted several days, marking the beginning a full-blown civil war that lasted for decades, and tore apart the Sri Lanka to its very core.
According to Prabhakaran, the 1983 'holocaust', infamously dubbed 'Black July', 'united all sections of the Tamil masses'. Soon, the onset of July instilled fear among Sri Lanka's Sinhalese majority as the the LTTE would commemorate the month with bombings and assassinations, while Prabhakaran rose from a radical Tamil nationalist to a feared terrorist insurgent. Why Prabhakaran assassinated Rajiv Gandhi?
India is home to a large population of ethnic Tamils and the Indian state is believed to have clandestinely supported the Tamil cause in Sri Lanka since its very inception. However, in 1987, then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi decided send in Indian peacekeeping troops to Sri Lanka, to crush the LTTE and Tamil nationalist movement in the neighboring country.
Consequently, the LTTE, under the leadership of Prabhakaran, orchestrated the assassination of the then Indian Prime Minister, when he was targeted by a female suicide bomber in during a public meeting in Tamil Nadu in 1991.
The incident made Prabhakaran the most wanted man in India and changed the public opinion about the Tamilian cause in Sri Lanka, even though the LTTE leader never claimed responsibility for the assassination. 'It is a tragic incident that happened 10 years ago. We are not in a position to make a comment,' Prabhakaran told reporters in 2002. Prabhakaran's cult of personality
Over the years, the LTTE became a cult of personality centered around Prabhakaran as the group steadily acquired massive caches of conventional weapons, and also pioneered two of the most brutal tactics of modern guerrilla warfare; child recruitment and suicide bombing.
As per 1996 UN report, children as young as 10 deployed to kill women and children in remote rural villages, while about 40%-60% dead LTTE fighters during the 1990s were children under 18, according to a 2004 Human Rights Watch report. Later in 1987, Prabhakaran founded the Black Tigers– suicide cadres of the LTTE, most of whom were young women.
These future suicide bombers would be graced with a private dinner with Prabhakaran, before being deployed on their missions, as per reports. How Prabhakaran was killed?
On May 18, 2009, the Sri Lankan government announced that Prabhakaran had been killed in action by Sri Lankan forces, decades after the dreaded terrorist leader had been pursued by the country's armed forces through jungles and other rough terrains. Akin to other LTTE fighters, Prabhakaran had pledged to die by suicide, and reportedly wore a cyanide capsule around his neck if he was ever captured by the Sri Lankan Army.
In a 2002 press conference, the LTTE supremo revealed that he has directed his aides and bodyguards to kill him if his capture was imminent, and he was unable to end his life at that time. A day after his death, the Sri Lankan army released images of his dead body, still draped in LTTE fatigues, on state-run TV, where his face was clearly visible.