Govt. chopper ride for Tiger

The government was forced to provide a chopper ride for secretary general of the LTTE peace secretariat Sivaratnam Prabhakaran alias S. Pulideven as he declined to travel overland to Kilinochchi after arriving at the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) from Switzerland.

Pulideven and two of his female colleagues arrived in the early hours of Saturday and were escorted to a star-class hotel nearby. They were to be escorted by the army to be Omanthai entry/exit point on the Kandy-Jaffna A9 road as they took the same route on their way to the BIA last week.

But on their return, Pulideven insisted on the deployment of a helicopter as one of his companions was having what our source described as a "health problem."

However, if it really was a health problem, she wouldn’t have returned to Kilinochchi but entered a hospital in Colombo as several Tigers including Pulidevan had done since the cease-fire agreement. (SF)