'Waterloo Suresh' fights for a bright future, free from charges of supporting terrorism

TORONTO -- Suresh Sriskandarajah is clean-cut, articulate and polite. He speaks three languages, holds three university degrees and is CEO of his own web design company.

At 29, he should have a bright future. Instead he is about to be extradited to the United States to face terrorism-related charges that could see him imprisoned for 25 years.

“This is not what I’m supposed to be doing,” he told the National Post. “I don’t want to waste my life in custody. I just want to forget about this and move on and become a productive member rather than wasting time in jail.”

But that is where he is headed. On June 9, he will surrender into custody. If all goes as expected, he will be sent to Brooklyn, N.Y., where a grand jury has indicted him for allegedly helping Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers launder money, buy equipment and smuggle it into rebel territory.

The lanky Sri Lankan-born Canadian has kept quiet since he was arrested in Toronto in 2006 following a joint FBI-RCMP investigation, but he broke his silence this week in an exclusive interview, his first since his arrest. “I just want to see this resolved and move forward in life and contribute back to society,” he said.

“Waterloo Suresh,” as he is known, comes from a family of fishermen.

They lived in Valvettithurai, a town on Sri Lanka’s northern coast that is best known as the home of the Tamil guerrilla leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, whose death one year ago marked the end of Sri Lanka’s long, brutal civil war.

Early in the war, the Vadamarachi region, where Mr. Sriskandarajah’s family lived, fell under rebel influence. When the army launched its counter-insurgency in 1987, the family’s house was damaged and they fled to a nearby village.

At age seven, Mr. Sriskandarajah was at home alone when a young rebel entered the house pursued by Sri Lankan soldiers. Realizing he could not escape, the rebel swallowed cyanide. “He literally died in front of me,” Mr. Sriskandarajah said.

On the way to school later, soldiers tried to talk to Mr. Sriskandarajah but he was frightened and when he didn’t answer, they beat him so hard with their rifle butts he was hospitalized three weeks.

As the war closed in, the family decided to get out. Mr. Sriskandarajah’s father was hired as a deckhand on a Saudi oil tanker. During a port of call in Montreal, he jumped ship and called for his family to join him.

They sold their fishing boats and jewelry to pay for the journey and arrived in Montreal in 1989 in the middle of winter. His father worked at a factory that made auto brake pads but he walked out on the family, leaving Mr. Sriskandarajah’s mother with $24.

To help out, Mr. Sriskandarajah picked strawberries, sold chocolates and delivered newspapers. They became citizens of Canada in 1994. He discovered computers at Westview Centennial Secondary School in Toronto. He formed an Internet club and built websites for community groups. Xerox was so impressed it hired him, at age 15, to speak at trade shows.

He was a driven student. He won the $10,000 Canada Trust Horizon Scholarship and took part in the Forum for Young Canadians, which brought him to Ottawa to learn about government and meet Jean Chrétien, the Prime Minister.

He was also chosen for an international co-op program that sent him to the Eastern Caribbean, to the tiny unspoiled island of Dominica, to work for a cable and wireless company. He left high school with a 96% average.

At the University of Waterloo, he studied electrical engineering and joined the Tamil Students Association, eventually serving as president. It was mostly a social club but the members would talk about Sri Lanka, he said. “So I was aware of what was going on.”

On his website, planetsuresh.com, he posted photos of Tamil Tigers rebels and an account (written by someone else) of the government’s “holocaust” and “genocide” of ethnic Tamils. It described the separatist insurgency as an “armed freedom struggle” that was “legitimate and logical.”

The captions beneath the personal photos on the website suggest a life of privilege: “first skydive, Florida,” “gambling at Caesars, Atlantic City,” “on top of Whistler, B.C., ” “California road trip” and “testing out Ferrari, Seattle.”

During a co-op placement at Microsoft in Seattle, he met a group of Tamils involved in a project called the Vanni Institute of Technology. The idea was to build a training centre in the rebel capital Kilinochchi so promising students could learn computer skills. Mr. Sriskandarajah helped develop the curriculum.

At around the same time, a colleague returned from Sri Lanka with photos of an orphanage. Something clicked. Mr. Sriskandarajah had never returned to his homeland. He felt guilty about all he had. “At that moment, I just decided, I’m going,” he said.

He was excited to see Sri Lanka again. A ceasefire was in effect and he crossed into the rebel-held northern Vanni region to work at the institute. He also began volunteering at an orphanage on the beach at Mullaitivu. He played with the kids and built a website so donors could learn about the children and sponsor them.

He said he felt bad for the Tamils he met during his travels. He thought they were good people in a bad circumstance, and he knew that had he not escaped to Canada as a boy, he might be in their shoes.

Being in Tiger territory, he inevitably met and mingled with rebels. But he said while he wanted to help the Tamil people develop the public infrastructure in the north, where the economy was stunted by years of war, he was careful not to cross the line. He said he never fought for the rebels, received no military training and was never made a member of the Tamil Tigers.

According to U.S. prosecutors, however, he began working for the rebels a few months after returning to Canada. On Sept. 29, 2004, he sent an e-mail to Pratheepan Thavarajah, a senior rebel arms procurement agent. The message concerned the purchase of communications towers.

He later sent Pratheepan another e-mail suggesting he get in touch with a contact at military contractor Raytheon, the prosecutors allege. The contact worked “on air traffic radars. He does talk a lot but does little…but see if he’s of any use to you,” Mr. Sriskandarajah wrote.

At the end of the fall term at Waterloo, he returned to Sri Lanka. On Boxing Day, 2004, a half-dozen giant waves swept over the island. Mr. Sriskandarajah rushed to the orphanage but it was gone. Only 20 of the 170 children had survived the tsunami.

He was devastated, and when humanitarian aid was slow to arrive, he became angry. “Politics was getting in the way of the distribution,” he said. “The government and the LTTE were not working together properly,” he said, using the acronym for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels.

Upon his return to Canada, he continued working for the rebels, the criminal complaint alleges. In March, 2005, he allegedly helped launder $13,150 in LTTE funds through U.S. bank accounts.

The prosecutors allege that on Oct. 23, Mr. Sriskandarajah sent an e-mail to three students instructing them how to smuggle materials such as laptops, compasses and GPS devices into rebel territory.

He told them that once they arrived in Colombo, they should speak only in English and tell the customs officers they were on vacation. “Give him a bag of chocolate,” he wrote. A van would be waiting to take them north, he said.

At the army checkpoint in Vavuniya, they should bribe the troops with chocolate and cigarettes, he told them. “Say you are just visiting around family; nothing else,” he wrote. “Now you get to the Tigers checkpoint, only five minutes away … Tell them Waterloo Suresh sent you.”

The following March, according to prosecutors, Mr. Sriskandarajah worked with a Canadian co-conspirator named Ramanan Mylvaganam to buy $22,000 worth of submarine and warship design software from a U.K. company.

“They are asking me a lot of questions. I don’t want to sound suspicious,” Mr. Mylvaganam wrote in an e-mail. Mr. Sriskandarajah said to tell them it was for a school project.

They also allegedly tried to buy night vision goggles from a company in British Columbia, the complaint alleges. Again, Mr. Sriskandarajah advised Mr. Mylvaganam to say it was for “a fourth year design project we are doing at the university.”

On August 21, 2006, Mr. Sriskandarajah was at his uncle’s home in Toronto’s Rexdale neighbourhood, preparing to take his cousins to the Wild Water Kingdom water park, when the RCMP arrived. The officer called his cell phone and told him to step outside. “I was surprised and shocked,” he said.

Mr. Mylvaganam was also arrested and has already been extradited. Last March 5, Justice Laurence Pattillo of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that there was sufficient evidence to justify Mr. Sriskandarajah’s extradition.

Mr. Sriskandarajah asked the government if he could stand trial in Canada instead, but that request was turned down last December by the Department of Justice in Ottawa.

Mr. Sriskandarajah has not wasted his time since his arrest. While out on bail, he earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Waterloo and a Master of Business Administration from Laurier University. He won the CIBC Leaders in Entrepreneurship Award.

Although at times he seems resigned to this fate, Mr. Sriskandarajah is not giving up. Last week, he launched a website, Justice for Suresh, that asks for donations and support letters. He also posted a video about his case on YouTube, and on Sunday he will speak at a banquet hall in Markham, Ont.

“It’s part of life,” he said. “You go through different experiences sometimes and you just have to look forward and be positive about the future. If you have any negative thoughts or any grudge, it’s just going to hurt your mind.”

Asked how he would do things differently in retrospect, he said, “just being more careful and paying more attention to make sure that everything that I am doing is correct and legal.”

sbell@nationalpost.com

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