Labelling it as a "major scam", the extended family of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) chief Velupillai Prabhakaran has urged all Tamils in India and around the world not to fall into the trap laid out by certain elements in the diaspora fraternity who have been collecting millions of dollars by saying that the slain Tamil leader is still alive.
Karthic Manoharan, the son of Prabhakaran's elder brother Velupillai Manoharan, told IANS that a "mafia gang" which wants to use Prabhakaran as a "brand name" and collects funds from Tamils living around the world is operating at a major scale.
V. Prabhakaran was killed during the final stages of Sri Lanka's 26-year-long bloody war against the LTTE, which was crushed by the Lankan security forces in May 2009.
"Give due respect to the dead. Not a penny given to the gang of fraudsters, who had been claiming that Prabhakran is alive, will go to the family or the poor and suffering Tamils in war-ravaged Sri Lanka, and instead end up in their pockets," said Karthic, the 43-year-old nephew of the late LTTE supreme leader.
Branding the alleged fraudsters as "liars", Karthic named some Indian Tamil leaders and Lankan-born Tamil Eelam campaigners for running a campaign to resurrect his dead uncle Prabhakaran and his only daughter Dwaraka Prabhakaran.
Manoharan's family has maintained an extremely low profile since they left Sri Lanka in 1983. They finally broke their silence after some diaspora groups in Switzerland enacted a fake drama with an AI-manipulated video speech of Dwaraka Prabhakaran on 'Maaveerar Naal' or 'Great Heroes Day' on November 27, 2023.
"We need to put an end to this nonsense. My uncle with his entire family died during the last stages of the war. This had been confirmed and if any of them were alive, they would have contacted us as we all were quite close and he used to call us from Sri Lanka," the nephew said.
He added that the final conversation his family had with Prabhakaran was in 2008, a year before the war came to an end.
"My uncle, in what turned out to be his last call, said that the situation was really bad in Sri Lanka," Karthic said.
Prabhakaran's parents were taken to India by Karthic's father Manoharan in 1983 along with the rest of the family after the ethnic war broke out in Sri Lanka, with the military hunting for the LTTE leader.
The family lived in Tamil Nadu for 13 years till 1998 and then migrated to Denmark through a UN agency.
"My father was planning to start a business in India but then Rajiv Gandhi's assassination happened and my uncle was the suspect. So, my dad was asked to leave India," the Tamil rebel leader's nephew told IANS.
The family later approached the UNHCR and moved to the Scandinavian country in 1996 which accepted their plea first.
However, Karthic said that because the family was related to the LTTE leader, they received "ill-treatment" from some diaspora groups in Denmark who had been amassing money in the name of the rebel movement.
"Having travelled from India, we were also branded as RAW agents," said Karthic, who expressed gratitude to the Indian government for allowing the family to stay in the country for more than a decade.
Karthic initially believed that his grandparents were also killed during the last days of the war in May 2009. The family later came to know that they were alive and had been kept in an army camp until his grandfather's death was announced in 2010. Prabhakaran's mother also died later.
One of Karthic's aunts (sister of Prabhakaran) still lives in India with her family while another resides in Canada.
However, he said, the extended family still cannot meet each other or travel due to many visa issues and fear of not being able to return.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
