Former TNA MP M. K. Sivajilingam yesterday (March 13) expressed confidence that there wouldn’t be any problems over the departure from the country of slain LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran’s mother, Parvathiepillai Velupplai, who left the county last week without informing the authorities.

In a brief interview with The Sunday Island, the Jaffna District MP said that he helped Parvathie to obtain a new passport about a month ago and the air ticket a few days before her departure in the early hours of March 6.

Sivajilingam, who ran at the recently concluded presidential election, accompanied the ailing woman on a Singapore Airlines flight to Malaysia where her late husband’s relatives received her.

Responding to a Sunday Island query, he said that the government hadn’t been aware of their departure until she reached Malaysia. According to him, Prabhakaran’s sister, Vinodhani Rajendran, who lives in Canada will arrange to take her 79-year mother there.

He expressed confidence that Canada would quickly facilitate her travel there and in the unlikely event of Ottawa turning her down, she would have to live with her other daughter in India.

Asked whether there had been some sort of an understanding between the government and him to release Parvathie, Sivajilingam said that the Army had released her after Prabrakaran’s father passed away at the Panagoda Army cantonment on January 6.

Initially, the government directed that the body of Prabhakaran’s father should be cremated in Colombo. Sivajilingam said the government had insisted that Parvathie would be released from Panagoda on the condition that she returned there after the funeral.

The MP said that he rejected both conditions, but the government subsequently allowed him to take the body to Velvettiturai, where the cremation took place on January 10. Prabhakaran’s mother had stayed at the government hospital at Velvettiturai until she returned to Colombo on March 2 and was accommodated at a small hotel at Bambalapitiya until her March 6 flight to Malaysia.

He said that Prabhakaran’s parents, who had sought refuge in India in 1983 returned here in 2003 after the Norwegians arranged CFA came into operation in February 2002.

He revealed that civilians fleeing fighting on the Mullaitivu front last year had helped Prabhakaran’s parents to reach the army-held area. The Army found them on May 28, ten days after troops killed Prabhakaran on the banks of the Nanthikadal lagoon.

Sivajilingam said that people would have revealed their identity to the Army. He said that Prabhakaran’s father would have promptly acknowledged his identity if the Army had asked him, the politician said.