[15][16][17][18] The LTTE was notable for using women and children in combat[19] and carrying out a number of high-profile assassinations, including former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.

These groups, along with another prominent figure of the armed struggle, Ponnuthurai Sivakumaran, were involved in several hit-and-run operations against pro-government Tamil politicians, Sri Lanka Police and civil administration during the early 1970s.

It has been stated that Prabhakaran sought to "refashion the old TNT/new LTTE into an elite, ruthlessly efficient, and highly professional fighting force",[43] by the terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna.

[49] In reaction to various geopolitical and economic factors, from August 1983 to May 1987, India, through its intelligence agency the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), provided arms, training and monetary support to six Sri Lankan Tamil insurgent groups including the LTTE.

Thenmozhi Rajaratnam alias Dhanu, who carried out the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and Sivarasan, the key conspirator, were among the militants trained by RAW in Nainital, India.

Initially, LTTE members were prohibited from having love affairs or sexual relationships as it could deter their prime motive, but this policy changed after Prabhakaran married Mathivathani Erambu in October 1984.

[63] In July 1987, faced with growing anger among its own Tamils and a flood of refugees,[55] India intervened directly in the conflict for the first time by initially airdropping food parcels into Jaffna.

The ruthlessness of this campaign, and the Indian army's subsequent anti-LTTE operations, which included civilian massacres and rapes made it extremely unpopular among many Tamils in Sri Lanka.

[80] Fighting continued throughout the 1990s, and was marked by two key assassinations carried out by the LTTE: those of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, and Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993, using suicide bombers on both occasions.

From 1998 onward, the LTTE regained control of these areas, which culminated in the capture in April 2000 of the strategically important Elephant Pass base complex, located at the entrance of the Jaffna Peninsula, after prolonged fighting against the Sri Lanka Army.

[93] The new government of Sri Lanka came into power in 2006 and demanded to abrogate the ceasefire agreement, stating that the ethnic conflict could only have a military solution, and that the only way to achieve this was by eliminating the LTTE.

After the breakdown of the peace process in 2006, the Sri Lankan military launched a major offensive against the Tigers, defeating the LTTE militarily and bringing the entire country under its control.

[128] 15 days after the announcement, on 5 August 2009, a Sri Lankan military intelligence unit, with the collaboration of local authorities, captured Pathmanathan in the Tune Hotel, in downtown Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The ISGA was to be entrusted with powers such as the right to impose law, collect taxes and oversee the rehabilitation process until a favourable solution was reached after which elections would be held.

[150] According to the assessments by independent observers, the LTTE administration of justice gained "significant social acceptance", and its courts were broadly seen as "more efficient, less expensive, and less vulnerable to corruption than their Sri Lankan counterparts.

[163] However, by 2002 with the shift in geopolitical climate, Prabhakaran endorsed "open market economy", but he pointed out that the question about the proper economic system can be considered only after the ethnic problem had been solved.

The deal with North Korean government was carried out by Ponniah Anandaraja alias Aiyannah, a member of World Tamil Coordinating Committee of the United States and later, the accountant of LTTE.

The merchant vessel Princess Iswari went from Indonesia to North Korea under captain Kamalraj Kandasamy alias Vinod, loaded the weapons and came back to international waters beyond Sri Lanka.

[182][183] As of October 2019, these include: The framing of terrorism, despite having no universally accepted definition, carries a connotation of moral illegitimacy and, as proscription, is used by states to criminalize their opponents and justify "extreme" measures against them.

[194] Moreover, despite its human rights abuses, Western states regarded Sri Lanka as a democratic ally in their promotion of a global liberal order and were committed to upholding its sovereignty.

In a statement, the European Parliament said that the LTTE did not represent all Tamils and called on it to "allow for political pluralism and alternate democratic voices in the northern and eastern parts of Sri Lanka".

[200] The then Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Mangala Samaraweera later recounted that there was a difficulty in adopting the ban as a unanimous decision due to the opposition from seven countries in the 25-member EU and that consensus was finally achieved only after he had met with the US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice several times.

The court noted that the basis of proscribing the LTTE had been based on "imputations derived from the press and the Internet" rather than on direct investigation of the group's actions, as required by law.

[211] Yassin, a Malay nationalist,[212] has been accused of using the ban to mastermind the "politically motivated" arrests of Indian Tamil members of the Democratic Action Party over alleged LTTE links.

[213] The LTTE leader Prabhakaran contested the terrorist designation of his organization, asserting that the international community had been influenced by the "false propaganda" of the Sri Lankan state and said that there was no coherent definition of the concept of terrorism.

[19] The LTTE conducted its first suicide attack on 5 July 1987 when Captain Miller rammed a truck filled with explosives into a Sri Lankan Army base in Jaffna killing scores of soldiers.

[255] N. Malathy, the former secretary of NESOHR, accused the UNICEF of sensationalizing this issue to fundraise and falsely listing disabled and orphaned children in the LTTE orphanages as child soldiers.

[265] In October 1987, the LTTE took advantage of communal violence in the Eastern Province, particularly in the Trincomalee District, where Tamils had previously been driven out by security forces and Sinhalese mobs in 1985.

One such incident was the mass murder of 600 unarmed Sri Lankan Police officers in 1990, in Eastern Province, after they surrendered to the LTTE on the request of President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

Rajan Hoole of UTHR(J) claims that various dissident sources allege that the number of Tamil dissenters and prisoners from rival armed groups clandestinely killed by the LTTE in detention or otherwise ranges from 8,000 - 20,000,[282] although he later stated that western agencies dismissed his figures as exaggeration.