Renegade Karuna deported to Sri Lanka

[TamilNet, Thursday, 03 July 2008, 17:25 GMT]
British Embassy spokesman Dominic Williams told BBC that Vinayagmoorthy Muralitharan, alias Karuna, had been removed from a UK detention centre and deported to Sri Lanka on 2 July, according to a BBC report. Karuna, a former Tiger commander who turned leader of a paramilitary group operated by the Sri Lanka Army in the East, completed a prison sentence in the UK, for the violation of UK's immigration rules.

Mr. Muralitharan was sentenced to nine months in prison for entering Britain on a Sri Lankan passport under a different name in January. Pleading guilty, Karuna had implicated the government of Sri Lanka and the defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa of providing the travel documents including the diplomatic passport for him to enter the United Kingdom.

Human rights group Amnesty International and New York based Human Rights Watched earlier urged the British Government to charge Karuna for war crimes.