Vinayagamoorthi Muralitharan, also known as Colonel Karuna, commander for the Batticaloa-Amparai, breaks from the LTTE forming a pro-government outfit. A road linking Jaffna peninsula and the rest of Sri Lanka opens after 12 years. It holds for five years despite many incursions from both sides. Norway-brokered ceasefire between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government comes into effect.Chandrika Kumaratunge, a former prime minister and later the first female president of Sri Lanka, is wounded in an assassination attempt during an election rally.Ranasinghe Premadasa, then president of Sri Lanka, is killed in a LTTE suicide bomb attack.Rajiv Gandhi, then Indian prime minister, is assassinated by a female LTTE suicide bomber.LTTE becomes the prominent Tamil armed group. Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord signed and India agrees to deploy peace keepers – the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF), which quickly gets drawn in to the civil war. The Indian government cracks down on armed Tamil groups in India.About 150,000 Tamil refugees flee to India, where Tamil military training camps are established. During “Black July”, Rioting erupts killing hundreds of people. First guerrilla-style ambush by LTTE kills 13 soldiers.LTTE proscribed as an illegal organisation.Tamil New Tigers re-named Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).
Velupillai Prabhakaran forms the Tamil New Tigers group to set up a separate homeland- the Tamil Eelam.
New constitution enshrines earlier law making Sinhala Sri Lanka’s official language and makes Buddhism the country’s official religion, further alienating Tamils who are mainly Hindus and Christians.Pacts are signed between the government and the Tamils giving them a measure of regional autonomy and freedoms in language and education, but the agreements remain largely on paper.Peaceful protests by Tamils are broken up by a Sinhala mob and riots follow. Solomon Bandaranyake, then prime minister, enacts a law making Sinhala the only official language of Sri Lanka, alienating the Tamils.Ethnic Tamils feel disenfranchised by the so-called “Citizenship Act” which denied citizenship to the Tamils and their descendents brought from India by the British to work on tea plantations Sri Lanka, then known as Ceylon, gains independence from British rule.Members of the LTTE have donned Velupillai Prabhakaran self-styled President and uniforms to directly battle the Lankan military – on land, sea and in the air.They have carried out more suicide attacks than Hamas, al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad combined.Known as the Tamil Tigers, the LTTE is notorious for introducing suicide bombers in general and female ones in particular.Founded and led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE is a paramilitary organization that has waged a campaign since the 1970’s with the goal of creating a separate Tamil state in northern Sri Lanka.
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