How one Tamil-Canadian turned to gun-running

FBI handout Satha Sarachandran, former national president of the Canadian Tamil Students Association, poses with a machine gun at a Tamil Tigers rebel camp in Sri Lanka.

He was a youth counsellor and student leader with a degree in computer science. He didn't drink or take drugs, and had lived a law-abiding life in Canada.

So how did Sathajhan Sarachandran end up in a federal detention centre in Brooklyn, N.Y., awaiting a possible life sentence for his crimes as a rebel arms merchant?

Documents filed in U.S. District Court this week tell for the first time the former University of Windsor student's account of how he became a procurement agent for the Tamil Tigers.

The 29-year-old was one of six Canadians arrested by the FBI and RCMP in 2006 after they allegedly tried to buy $1-million worth of weapons for the rebels, who were then fighting for independence for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority.

Three of them have pleaded guilty so far, including Sarachandran, who confessed to terrorism and conspiracy charges. He is to be sentenced on Jan. 11. His lawyers want him to serve no more than the minimum 25 years.

In their sentencing submission, his lawyers wrote that while Sarachandran was a willing participant in the arms plot, his conduct was "a young man's emotional response" to the horrors committed against Tamils.

Born in Sri Lanka's northern Jaffna province, Sarachandran was 12 when he came to Canada in 1992, joining his father, a civil engineer, who had made his way to Toronto three years earlier and worked as a cook and cashier.

At university in Windsor, Sarachandran joined the Tamil Students Association, and after graduating in 2002, he returned to Toronto and became active in the Tamil Youth Organization.

He was a "leader and a role model for the younger Tamil children" and "personified the success and hope that Tamil parents, as refugees, had for their children," wrote the lawyers, Anthony Ricco and Edward Wilford.

Following a 2003 ceasefire between the rebels and government forces, Sarachandran made two trips to Sri Lanka and visited the northern enclave of the Tamil Tigers, also known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE.

"It was while traveling in areas under the control of the LTTE that the travelers found the true devastation of war and were able to observe that the Tamil people had been the victims of extreme acts of violence by the government," the lawyers wrote.

In 2006, Sarachandran was watching the news on television when he saw footage of a Tamil orphanage that had been bombed by Sri Lankan government planes, killing 56 children and youths, the lawyers wrote.

"It was at that moment that he decided that he wanted to do something to help end the violence, so he permitted himself to be used by the LTTE in their search for weaponry to arm themselves."

However, the orphanage bombing occurred on Aug. 14, 2006. According to prosecutors, Sarachandran began negotiating to buy the weapons on July 31, 2006, when he met a man in New York he thought was an illicit arms dealer but who was actually working undercover for the FBI.

Eventually, they struck a deal to purchase 10 missile launchers, 20 Russian SA-18 surface-to-air missiles and 500 AK-47 assault rifles for US$900,000. The weapons were to be delivered by ship off the southern coast of India.

The men were arrested Aug. 19. When RCMP officers searched Sarachandran's house in Toronto, they found photos of him holding a machine gun and firing a rifle at a rebel camp.

Sarachandran "recognizes and accepts that he must serve a long prison sentence" and that there are those who do not believe his political views are legitimate, the lawyers wrote.

"However, Sathajhan Sarachandran, as Nelson Mandela did many years ago, merely wants the court to know of the emotional anguish and sense of hopelessness that motivated him."

National Post

sbell@nationalpost.com

Thanks to National Post ; Michael Walter Canada