MADRAS, 26 July 2004 — A Sri Lankan member of Parliament, M.K. Eelavendhan, was detained on Saturday night on his arrival here from Colombo and deported back to Lanka, according to highly placed immigration sources at Madras airport.
Eelavendhan, who is a nominated member of Parliament and represents the Tamil National Alliance sympathetic to the LTTE, arrived by a Jet Airways flight at 3.30 p.m. But he was detained by immigration authorities at the airport despite law that allows an MP of a member country of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation to travel freely within the region.
Both India and Sri Lanka are SAARC members.
Eelavendhan was on his way to Bangalore to attend a conference organized by a section of Tamil nationalist organizations based in Madras.
“We had orders from Delhi that he be deported,” a top immigration official said on condition of anonymity.
Eelavendhan is a strong supporter of the Tamil Tiger rebels. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is branded a terrorist organization in India and accused of assassinating former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.
Eelavendhan first came to India in the aftermath of the large-scale killing of Tamils in Sri Lanka in June 1983, but went back a few years later.
He came back to India in the mid-1990s, and was even arrested in 1997 on charges of smuggling medicines for the LTTE, which at that time was waging a war of liberation in Sri Lanka.
Though he was let off at that time, he was deported ostensibly for “overstaying his visa.”
