Tamil nationalist leader P Nedumaran Monday claimed that LTTE chief Velupillai Prabhakaran was still alive

Prabhakaran’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had fought a bloody war for an independent Tamil homeland. He was killed by the Sri Lankan military in 2009

Pazha Nedumaran is a writer, activist, editor-in-chief of the Tamil by-weekly Then Seidi, and a former member of the Congress party.

Nedumaran shared good terms with Prabhakaran, and had even travelled to Sri Lanka during the war to meet the LTTE leader. In 1992, he was booked for sedition for a ‘pro-LTTE’ speech. Though a chargesheet was filed in 1994, the case didn’t come up for trial.

On May 18, 2009, Sri Lanka announced it had killed Prabhakaran. In the months before, the Sri Lankan army had launched an all-out offensive against the Tigers, slowly pushing them deeper inside strongholds in northern Sri Lanka.

According to Sri Lanka’s officials, he was killed as he tried to escape with a band of followers in an armour-plated van, with more rebel commanders accompanying them in a bus.