New Tamil Tiger leader arrested in Malaysia (Update 2)

COLOMBO: Sri Lankan authorities questioned the new leader of the Tamil Tiger rebels Friday after he was arrested in Southeast Asia and flown to this island nation.

Selvarasa Pathmanathan, the insurgent group's former chief arms smuggler, assumed the leadership of the Tamil Tigers after government forces routed the rebels in May in northern Sri Lanka and killed their revered leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran.

Pathmanathan was believed to be based in Southeast Asia in recent years and was one of the few rebel leaders to survive the government offensive that demolished the separatists' shadow state in northern Sri Lanka and ended the quarter century civil war.

But as Pathmanathan, known by his nom de guerre KP, worked to revive the Tamil Tigers, the government pushed for his arrest.

The rebels said in a statement that Pathmanathan was arrested Wednesday near a hotel in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

A pro-rebel Web site said Pathmanathan had gone to the hotel to meet relatives of the group's slain political leader, Balasingham Nadesan.

He left the room to answer a phone call, but did not return, it said.

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said he had no knowledge on the arrest.

“I cannot confirm this. I don’t have the facts with me. I will find out about the matter first,” he told reporters after launching the Majlis Jalinan Rakyat at the people’s housing project at Batu Muda, Jalan Ipoh in Kuala Lumpur on Friday.

Malaysian national police chief Tan Sri Musa Hassan said he knew nothing about an arrest and declined to comment further.

Sri Lanka's Island newspaper, quoting anonymous sources, said Pathmanathan had been captured in Thailand.

Thai government spokesman Panitan Wattanayagorn denied he was arrested there but said there were "reports that he has been traveling in and out of Thailand."

A Thai military intelligence official said Pathamanathan had been hiding in northern Thailand under a false identity in recent months.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the government did not want to acknowledge his presence in the country.

Sri Lanka's military spokesman Brig. Udaya Nanayakkara said Pathmanathan - who was wanted by Interpol - had been brought to Sri Lanka and was being interrogated.

He refused to say where Pathmanathan had been arrested or whether the military or police had custody of him.

The arrest was expected to give President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his allies a boost ahead of local government elections Saturday in the northern towns of Jaffna and Vavuniya, just outside the rebels' former heartland.

The government said the polls proved it was returning democracy to the region, but it has been criticised for banning foreign media from traveling to the towns to cover the elections.

The Sri Lankan authorities planned to hold a news conference Friday to discuss the arrest, a major blow to the rebel group's efforts to regroup after its devastating battlefield defeat.

Soon after the defeat, Pathmanathan declared himself the new leader of the Tamil Tigers, swore off violence and worked to transform a group shunned internationally as a terror organization into a democratic movement for Tamil statehood.

He cast himself as a defender of the nearly 300,000 Tamil civilians displaced by the fighting and held in government detention camps in the area.

However, some Tamil expatriates were furious with Pathmanathan for so swiftly acknowledging Prabhakaran's death in battle in May while many of the rebel chief's followers insisted he still lived.

In a sign Pathmanathan was having trouble uniting the Tamil community behind him, the rebel-linked TamilNet Web site did not even report his arrest.

Pathmanathan rose to prominence as the architect of the group's vast international smuggling ring of arms, drugs and possibly even people that Jane's Intelligence Review estimated earned the rebels up to $300 million a year.

Sri Lankan officials have told The Associated Press that Pathmanathan traveled with dozens of passports - including Indian, Egyptian, Malaysian - and bought weapons from countries including Thailand, Indonesia, Bulgaria and South Africa.

The rebels had fought a 25-year battle to carve out an independent state for minority Tamils after decades of marginalisation by governments controlled by the Sinhalese majority.

Between 80,000-100,000 people were killed in the violence. - AP