After it was renamed as Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and restructured under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the group staged low key attacks against various government targets, including policemen and local politicians.
[1] During this period, LTTE was supported by Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), which considered the militant organization as a tool to pressurize government to agree to their demands.
During the early 1980s, various geo-political compulsions prompted the Government of India to sponsor and nurture the Tamil Tigers by providing arms, training and monetary support through its intelligence agency Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).
[2] This relationship fell apart as LTTE declared war against Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), which was deployed to enforce disarmament of militant organizations and to watch over the regional council.
Meanwhile, the Sri Lankan government under President Ranasinghe Premadasa, driven by its own compulsion to see the IPKF withdraw, clandestinely supported the LTTE by handing over arms consignments.
This period ended with the withdrawal of IPKF in 1990 and the assassinations of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and Sri Lankan President Premadasa in 1991 and 1993 respectively.
[9] Rohan Gunaratna, a pro-government scholar[10] and an international terrorism expert, alleged that LTTE supplied forged passports to Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.
[11] Peter Chalk, a professor at Queensland University in Australia divided the foreign activities of LTTE into three main areas: publicity and propaganda; fundraising; arms procurement and shipping.
During the late 1970s, V. N. Navaratnam, who was an executive committee member of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), introduced many influential and wealthy Tamils living overseas to the LTTE.
These organizations were largely helped by the deluge of Sri Lankan Tamil people migrated to western countries as a result of the Black July ethnic riots in 1983.
The largest centres were located in major western states with large Sri Lankan Tamil communities, most notably the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and Australia.
[13] Primary propaganda message these offices had to spread to garner the international political support was that there can be no peace in Sri Lanka until the Tamils, led by the LTTE, are granted their own homeland.
[12] He, in the year 2000, commented that "LTTE international propaganda war is conducted at an extremely sophisticated level and far more so than any counter-campaign that the Colombo Government has, hitherto, been able to organize".
Some of the diaspora members, who had personally experienced ethnic riots and ones who believed in an armed struggle and quest for a separate Tamil state, voluntarily donated money to the LTTE front organizations.
Arunachalam Chrishanthakumar who ran the British Tamil Association, successor to the UTO was warned by UK authorities in 2004 after he was found to have bought boots and handcuffs for the LTTE police force.
[17] On the death of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, Rajasingham Jayadevan has said "He will always be a hero to Tamils", "In the West he was misunderstood but we knew he was the only man who could fight Sri Lankan racism".
[18] In 2014 Jayadevan spoke of his efforts, with assistance of his local MP and "good friend" Barry Gardiner, in arranging a British Passport for LTTE chief negotiator Anton Balasingam[19] In 2007, after a 21-month probe, the Charity Commission for England and Wales suspended the transactions, including bank accounts of the London-based charitable organisation Sivayogam Trust which ran a Temple in Tooting, South London.
In 2006, Director of Communications of Canadian Tamil Congress (CTC) Sahilal Sabaratnam, a student of the University of Toronto Sathajhan Sarachandran and 8 others were arrested by Federal Bureau of Investigation for trying to purchase Russian-made missiles and firearms worth $1 million, for the LTTE.
[29] They had attempted to bribe US Justice of Dept officials with $1 million in exchange for removing LTTE from FBI's list of banned terrorist organizations.
[31] In 2009, Aruran Vinayagamoorthy, Sivarajah Yathavan and Armugan Rajeevan of Tamil Coordinating Committee (TCC) in Melbourne pleaded guilty to offences under the Charter of the United Nations Act 1945 (Cth) for making assets available to the LTTE.
[33] The interim report of the Jain Commission, which oversaw the investigation into Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, indicted M. Karunanidhi, the former Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu for abetting the LTTE.
It also added that Father S. J. Emmanuel, President of the GTF made 2 or 3 visits to Sri Lanka to meet with Castro and conducted classes at the Nathan base of LTTE, on how to deal with the diaspora from Vanni.