SUN SEA’S CANADIAN LINK

SUN SEA’S CANADIAN LINK 2

ZoomBookmarkSharePrintListenTranslateOn the smugglers’ trail, Part II

‘Nobody disagrees that human smugglers are opportunists’

Canada is now a target of Southeast Asia’s human smuggling syndicates. Today, in the second installment of a four-part investigative series, the National Post tells the story of the Canadians linked to the MV Sun Sea smuggling investigation. BANGKOK • In the office of Thailand’s Anti Human Trafficking Division, Colonel Panya Pinsook flips through photos of engine parts, sacks of food, plastic oil drums — and the Canadians caught with the cache of supplies.

ROYAL THAI POLICE Above: Canadian Nadarajah Mahendran, third from left, outside a Bangkok police station.

The man with the blurred face is the alleged owner of the MV Sun Sea, who cannot be identified due to a publication ban ordered by the Immigration and Refugee Board. In the foreground are oil drums holding 500 litres of engine lubricant that police believe was for the ship. Bottom left: The alleged owner of the MV Sun Sea with suspected engine parts seized by Thai police. He cannot be identified because he is now in Canada seeking refugee status. Bottom right: Mahendran, right, and three others during a June 2010 police raid on their Bangkok apartment building. The man with the blurred face is the alleged owner of the MV Sun Sea. Police found the provisions during a raid on a Bangkok apartment building last June. They suspect it was being stockpiled for the ship MV Sun Sea, which was then being readied for a human smuggling run to Canada.

The four men arrested that day were all foreigners: the 30-year-old Sri Lankan businessman who had purchased the Sun Sea three months earlier, a Frenchman named Markandu Thayakaran and two citizens of Canada.

Nadarajah Mahendran, 54, is an importer of South Asian clothing and a former Toronto convenience store owner with a wife and three kids, and Thampeernayagam Rajaratnam, also 54, lives in suburban Markham, Ont.

Contacted by the National Post, neither of the Canadians would agree to talk about how they came to be in Bangkok with suspected supplies for the MV Sun Sea, together with the owner of the smuggling ship (who later boarded the vessel and is now in Canada claiming refugee status).

But details of the arrests are contained in two thick binders that document the results of Project Hydra, a Thai antihuman smuggling task force set up last year to investigate the Sun Sea in coordination with an RCMP investigation called Project Eprofluent and an Australian Federal Police probe called Longfin.

Since the MV Sun Sea arrived off the British Columbia coast last August carrying 492 Sri Lankan asylum seekers, government officials as senior as Immigration Minister Jason Kenney have said that Canadians had played a role in the massive human smuggling operation. But none of the suspects has yet been identified.

RCMP Deputy Commissioner Bob Paulson confirmed to the National Post that Canadian citizens were among those being investigated over their suspected roles in the Sun Sea. He would not say whether the men arrested in Bangkok were among them. “I can’t really comment on that except that was good, that was an illustration of a cooperative enforcement action. And then to the extent that anybody is exposed to our jurisdiction, then we’re engaged in assessing that,” the deputy commissioner said.

Reached by phone in Ajax, Ont., Mr. Mahendran, said he would speak to a reporter the next day but never did. When the National Post followed up and visited the new home, he was told to leave the property or police would be called. A letter sent to the address requesting an interview went unanswered. Mr. Mahendran has not been charged with human smuggling.

On the Scarborough cul de sac where, until recently, Mr. Mahendran lived for many years in a small red brick house, neighbors said he ran a clothing import business and travelled frequently. They said his wife was a seamstress and that they had two boys and a girl.

“He used to go back and forth,” Parbatti Randoll, who lives next door, said of his travels. She said he once had a shop at the nearby Lawrence Ave. E. and Birchmount Rd. intersection. The family moved out last November, she said. Another neighbor said his last trip abroad, a year ago, was a particularly long one.

“He was a very good man,” Ms. Randoll said.

Mr. Mahendran was born in 1956 in Inuvil, Sri Lanka, according to his passport. The northern farming town has a women’s hospital, and expectant mothers from surrounding villages often travel there to give birth.

Inuvil was not spared the horrors of the island’s long civil war. Inhabited mostly by minority ethnic Tamils, the town suffered executions, disappearances and shelling as government troops, Indian peacekeepers and Tamil rebels fought it out.

There is no public record of how or when Mr. Mahendran arrived in Canada but in 2003, he opened SRV Gifts & Clothes World Inc., naming himself as administrator and secretary. The company opened a shop in the heart of Toronto’s Tamil-Canadian neighborhood that his neighbors said sold imported South Asian clothing. In 2006, he registered another Ontario business at the same address. It was called SRV Convenience Plus.

A list of donors at a 2007 fundraiser for the Tamils Rehabilitation Organization (TRO) shows a $50 contribution from an “N. Mahendran” beside the same phone number as that listed online for SRV Gifts. The Canada Revenue Agency alleges the TRO was an arm of the Tamil Tigers, although the group denies that.

After obtaining a Canadian passport in Whitby in 2008, Mr. Mahendran left the following year for the United Arab Emirates, India, Burma and Thailand, the entry and exit stamps and visas in his passport indicate.

Then on March 1, 2010, he bought a plane ticket from VMS Travels & Tours in Scarborough. It was an economy class, round trip ticket on Cathay Pacific, leaving Toronto for Hong Kong on March 10 and transiting to Bangkok. He paid $1,690.

The immigration stamps in his passport show he traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, later in March. He was scheduled to return to Toronto on May 10 but another passport stamp indicates he was still in Malaysia on May 25.

By then, the international police probe of the MV Sun Sea was well underway.

Canada and Australia had learned that Sri Lankans were obtaining Thai tourist visas in Colombo and flying to Bangkok, where they were being taken to a 30-year-old freighter that was about to sail for Canada.

The ship, MV Sun Sea, had been purchased in March by the Sun & Rshiya Company, which had incorporated in Thailand in 2008 for “trading and agricultural products.” The company initially had two directors, one Thai and one Sri Lankan. But the Thai later left.

By early May, a few hundred Sri Lankan migrants were already on board the Sun Sea, most having put down a deposit of about $5,000, in some cases paid by family members who sold their land and jewelry, in others by relatives already in Western countries. The balance, $20,000 to $25,000, was to be paid after they reached Canada.

The Royal Thai Navy spotted the ship in the Gulf of Thailand during the first week of May but had no authority to board it or interfere with its journey since it was outside Thailand’s territorial waters. It was last seen heading east on May 9.

Three weeks later, on May 28, an Australian police official sent a letter to his Thai counterpart advising him that there were indications more passengers would be leaving Bangkok to board the human smuggling ship.

Police suspected the migrants would be moved south by bus to the port city of Songkhla. From there, longtail boats would take them to larger fishing vessels which would then deliver them to the Sun Sea, according to the letter.

“AFP is unsure where these Sri Lankan passengers are located but we believe they are currently in Bangkok,” the letter said. It added that the Australian police and RCMP liaison officers wanted to meet with Thai police.

In particular, they wanted to discuss “any action that can be taken against the passengers if they take a bus from Bangkok to Songkhla” and “any action that can be taken if the passengers assemble on the beach,” it said. Thai police went to work. They tracked the owner of the Sun Sea to a Bangkok apartment block, which they raided on June 3, arresting the four foreigners, according to Col. Panya and Thai police documents.

Police photos taken during the arrests show the two Canadians squatting beside the ship’s owner on the floor of a parking garage as police sort through the seized materials — which included 529 litres of engine lubricant and sacks of flour and vegetables.

One of the photos shows the ship owner posing with an assortment of metal parts. Col. Panya said police were aware the Sun Sea was having engine troubles at the time. The parts and supplies were found in the ship owner’s apartment as well as in a passenger van parked in the garage, Col. Panya said.

“I don’t want to say anything,” Mr. Rajaratnam said when asked about the incident. His Canadian passport shows he was born in Jaffna, Sri Lanka in 1957. Property records show he bought his home in Markham in 2003. He traveled to the United Kingdom in 2006 and to Sri Lanka from May 12 to 28, 2008, according to the stamps in his passport.

He said he did not know Mr. Mahendran or the owner of the ship, and that 15 to 20 Sri Lankans were staying at the same apartment building and suggested he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. “There’s a lot of Sri Lankans there,” he said. He referred questions to his lawyer but declined to provide the lawyer’s name.

The arrests resulted in only a charge for improper storage of materials and a fine of 10,000 Thai Baht, about $320, the police colonel said. The men were then handed over to the Immigration Bureau, which detains foreign nationals no longer permitted to stay in Thailand. Mr. Mahendran flew back to Toronto but the ship owner somehow slipped away, the colonel said.

On August 12, the Sun Sea entered Canadian waters off Vancouver Island and was intercepted by the RCMP and Navy. At a naval base near Victoria, the 492 passengers disembarked, including the ship owner and his pregnant wife.

Initially, he gave Canadian authorities a false name. But after a month, he acknowledged his true identity. He reportedly denies owning the ship. He cannot be named because he is seeking refugee status in Canada and the Immigration and Refugee Board has imposed a publication ban on his case.

Charging the smugglers behind the Sun Sea and the Ocean Lady, which brought 76 Sri Lankans to Canada in 2009, is a national tactical priority for the RCMP. A major investigation is underway in several countries.

But Douglas Cannon, a Vancouver lawyer who has represented several Sun Sea passengers, said human smugglers are not the problem. He blamed conditions in Sri Lanka, where the ethnic Tamil minority has long suffered widespread human rights abuses.

“Nobody disagrees that human smugglers are opportunists but that’s not the problem,” he said. “The problem is persecution that’s creating this terrible situation where people feel like they have to access rickety ships just to be safe.”

Deputy Paulson, head of the RCMP’s Federal Policing program, said he could not confirm whether either of the Canadians arrested in Bangkok were questioned by investigators upon their return to Toronto. He said such investigations were complex.

“I’m not making excuses except to say that the reality is, evidence collection abroad, introduction in a Canadian court, application of the Charter, all of those things are very complicated considerations,” he said.

 “I know it seems like — you’ve got pictures for God sakes — but demonstrating intent, linking it to the conspiracy, all those things are big chunks and investigative gaps that need to be closed with reliable evidence.”

BY STEWART BELL

The National Post