Thursday, April 30, 2009

War won’t stop until Prabhakaran is taken, dead or alive

Defence Sectary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa yesterday rejected visiting British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s call for a ceasefire and access for aid workers to the civilian zone, and told him that the government would not stop its war on terror until the LTTE was crushed and its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran captured, dead or alive.

"The only person who could stop this war is only the President of Sri Lanka," a plain-spoken Defence Secretary told the British dignitaries.


"My problem is not what the LTTE will do to you," the Defence Secretary said laughing, "instead it is that should such a thing happen, we would not be able to take Prabhakaran as planned!" He said after thirty years, the time had come finally for Prabhakaran and other terrorist leaders to be captured dead or alive and the government would not stop until that end was achieved.

Defence Sectary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa yesterday rejected visiting British Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s call for a ceasefire and access for aid workers to the civilian zone, and told him that the government would not stop its war on terror until the LTTE was crushed and its leader Velupillai Prabhakaran captured, dead or alive.

According to highly placed sources, briefing a British delegation that included the British Foreign Secretary, British High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Dr. Peter Hayes and two other diplomats, at the Foreign Ministry, yesterday morning the Defence Secretary did not mince his words, when he said it was Sri Lankan troops and civilians who had perished in the conflict and therefore the government was determined to finish off the LTTE. He said humanitarian concerns were only a ploy employed by some people to extricate Prabhakaran and his top leaders from the mess they had got into. He said a truce would only help the LTTE to regroup.

"The only person who could stop this war," a plain-spoken Defence Secretary told the British dignitaries, "is only the President of Sri Lanka." The military had orders to either capture or destroy Prabhakaran and other top LTTE leaders, he added.

Rajapaksa told the British delegation that since March 2009, over 200,000 persons had been rescued by the army. "On April 20 alone we secured the release of over 45,000 men, women and children from the clutches of the LTTE," he said promising to rescue the others shortly. He said the whole world had witnessed that rescue operation that the army had conducted without firing a single shot.

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