A FATHER COMMITS SUICIDE OVER ABDUCTED DAUGHTER AND HEROIC VILLAGERS CHASE OUT RECRUITERS TO SAVE FIVE BOYS IN THE EAST
By Walter Jayawardhana reporting from Los Angeles
July 13.12.15 PM:A suicide of a heart broken father caused by the abduction of his daughter by the Tigers on one occasion and the heroic act of villagers whose ire prevented the LTTE child recruiters from catching five boys returning from school for military enslavement on another were reported in the midst of a heightened campaign to recruit Tamil school children for forced military training by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) last week in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka.
On conservative estimates, more than 10,000 children have been abducted by the Tamil rebel group after it entered into a ceasefire agreement with the Ranil Wickremesinghe government and the government used its influence to suppress the international campaign against child military conscription in Sri Lanka to satisfy political purposes that would gain the group’s support to the government, it has been alleged by human rights groups in Sri Lanka.
Ramupillai Subramaniam, a 54 year old father of seven children at Sampur , Trincomalee was visited by a group of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the visitors abducted his 14 year old dughter Vijaya-Nandani for forced military training by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, July 1. He went in search of his daughter and cried and pleaded his case with the all-mighty LTTE war lords without any success. Left without any hope, he mixed a poison with arrack, drank it to commit suicide after five days. He died July 8 in an intensive care unit at Trincomalee Hospital
But the fate of five Tamil teenage boys were luckier than that of Vijaya-Nandani. On July 10, five teenage boys were returning home from school in an area South of Muttur, in the same Trincomalee District. Around 2.00 p.m., a group of LTTE recruiters surrounded them forcing them to get into a van. But irate villagers suddenly gathered at the scene and protested in the strongest possible language. The tough recruiters could not resist their ire and finally ran away.
The whole incident was revealed when one of the fathers of the children who were surrounded by the LTTE abductors, K.Nadarajah made a formal complaint about the incident to the Police Post at Thanger-Nagar. The Muttur Police is conducting further inquiries.
In the case of the helpless fourteen year old Vijaya-Nandini, whose lawful government abandoned her and her likes to the Tamil Tigers there might be no hope for the future . Her father , before his untimely death over a lovable daughter went and saw Devan , a semi literate war-lord who was in charge of the LTTE office at Sampur. Devan suggested that the farther should see even a mightier lord than himself about his daughter and advised him to go and see Thilak, the warlord of the whole Trincomalee District. But Thilak told the distraught father that Devan is the correct man to see over his daughter.
Sent from pillar to post, Subramanium came home in a highly depressed state and consumed the poison- arrack mixture and was admitted by his family to Muttur hospital from where he was transferred to the intensive care unit of the Trincomalee base hospital and died , July 8.
The LTTE terrorists visited the funeral house not to respect the dead but to advise the family how to give false evidence at the coroner’s inquest. They wanted them to say that Subramanium died drinking the poison mistakenly identifying it as arrack.
The LTTE child recruiters have intensified their activities all over the District. Several LTTE cadres lectured primary school children in the Serunuwara, Kantale area , July 10 security reports described.
A police complaint made by a student of Thangar Nagar Primary School stated that the LTTE lecture was made during school hours and the lecturers said the students should voluntarily join the LTTE fighting forces . Otherwise they warned that they would be conscripted.
