KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian police on Friday said they have arrested four more suspected Tamil Tiger separatists, including a man allegedly involved in the attempted assassination of a former Sri Lankan president.

The four are believed to be senior members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, also known as the Tamil Tigers, crushed in 2009 after a 26-year civil war over their bid to carve out a independent state in the north of the Indian Ocean island.

The arrests come after three Sri Lankans, including two refugees, were deported in May amid a crackdown on suspected militants, prompting criticism from the United Nations refugee agency.

Federal police chief Khalid Abu Bakar said the latest arrests happened in raids around the capital Kuala Lumpur on Thursday. The suspects “were planning to reactivate the group by making Malaysia as their base of operations.” Some activists, he said, had exploited their status as refugees to pursue illegal activities.

One of them is believed to have been involved in the attempted assassination of former Sri Lankan president Chandrika Kumaratunga in 1999, while another is a suspected bomb expert, Khalid said.

A large number of passports of various countries and fake Malaysian immigration rubber stamps were also recovered in the raids.

Khalid said half of the 14 suspected Tamil Tiger separatists arrested since 2009 had held refugee cards.

A spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Malaysia said Friday she had “no further information” on the latest arrests.

In May, the agency said it was “deeply concerned” that three men registered with the agency were deported to Sri Lanka without it being given access to them.

New York-based Human Rights Watch also slammed the deportation, saying the men could face torture in Sri Lanka.

Besides the Sri Lankans, authorities in a recent crackdown have arrested more than a dozen Malaysians suspected of recruiting and sending militants to Syria and Iraq, as well as a Somali accused of terrorist activities.”The police seriously view activities by foreign terrorists who attempt to use Malaysia as a transit, shelter and centre for their operations,” Khalid said in a statement.

Those arrested included a suspected militant linked to the attempted assassination in 1999 of former Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga.

A second suspect was described as an explosives expert, a third is alleged to have facilitated planned attacks on Sri Lankan consulates in India and the fourth is accused of gathering intelligence for the group. Counterfeit passports and other documents had been confiscated, Khalid said.

Malaysian police say they previously detained three men in mid-May suspected of trying to use Malaysia as a base to revive the separatist movement.

Malaysia deported the men back to Sri Lanka, where officials say they remain under investigation.

In April, the Sri Lanka military killed three Tamil separatist militants in the first combat since the government defeated the movement in 2009 after a decisive final advance against it lasting several months.

Authorities at the time said there had been attempts to revive the LTTE from abroad with funds illegally channelled to militants through a European countrty.

The United Nations has launched an inquiry into war crimes allegedly committed by both Sri Lankan state forces and Tamil rebels in the final months of the conflict, saying the government has failed to investigate properly.

The Sri Lankan authorities reject the allegations on grounds they amounts to interference in domestic affairs and say they are addressing issues of accountability. (Reporting By Trinna Leong and Al-Zaquan Amer Hamzah in Kuala Lumpur and Shihar Aneez in Colombo; Editing by Ron Popeski)