By JYOTI THOTTAM / NEW DELHI Tuesday, May. 19, 2009
Velupillai Prabhakaran, 54, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the LTTE) who was declared killed by the Sri Lankan government on May 18, had decades to think about how his end would come. It could have come from the cyanide capsule that he — like many Tiger fighters — wore around his neck, a pledge to commit suicide in case of capture by the Sri Lankan Army. He had been fighting a war for an independent homeland, or eelam, for the island's Tamil minority since 1983, and the Army pursued him throughout the jungles of the north and east for decades. In 2002, during a press conference near the beginning of a four-year-long ceasefire, Prabhakaran revealed that he had asked his aides to kill him if capture was near and he was unable to kill himself.
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