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UNDER the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tamil Tigers, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, was one of the world's deadliest insurgent groups and the progenitors of modern suicide bombing.
For Prabhakaran, no sacrifice was too great for the objective of "Eelam" (precious land), a Tamil state on an island of mainly Sinhalese Buddhists.
His suicide units, almost half of them women, killed thousands of people and assassinated two world leaders, the former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and the former Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.
Prabhakaran, 54, whose death in the final Tamil battle was confirmed on Sunday, was born in Valvettiturai, a fishing town, the son of a public servant.
In Sri Lanka the mainly Hindu Tamil minority had done well before independence. The British had also imported thousands of low-caste Tamil labourers from India to work the hill-country tea plantations.
Within a few years of the British departure in 1948, Sinhala became the island's official language and discriminatory laws affecting entry to university and the public service alienated moderate Tamils. The teenage Prabhakaran formed the Tamil New Tigers in 1972.
He became a wanted man in 1975 when he gunned down Alfred Duryappa, a former mayor of Jaffna. The killing of Tamils belonging to rival organisations became integral to his modus operandi. The Tamil New Tigers morphed into the LTTE.
By the late 1970s Junius Jayawardene's centre-right United National Party government in Colombo was becoming more pro-American and from the early 1980s Indira Gandhi's Indian government tolerated sanctuary and training for Tamil rebels.
Prabhakaran developed obsessive traits, refusing to drink bottled water not his own and sleeping with a pistol under his pillow. He cited Clint Eastwood as his role model. Full-scale war erupted after Sri Lanka-wide pogroms against Tamils in 1983. In 1987 Rajiv Gandhi and Jayawardene signed the Indo-Lanka accord in an attempt to staunch Tamil nationalism. But Prabhakaran vowed that only a separate state could offer a permanent solution.
When Indian peacekeeping troops went to war with the LTTE, Prabhakaran lived in a massive fortified camp in the jungle and, despite the LTTE's cardinal rule of celibacy, married Mathivathani Erambu. Tigers were then allowed to marry with Prabhakaran's sanction but the Tigers' code remained austere.
Prabhakaran formed the "Black Tigers", suicide bombers whose use of explosives-laden belts was copied by Palestinian, Chechen and Iraqi groups.
Between 1990 and 1995 the Tigers ran the northern Jaffna peninsula, with Prabhakaran as its absolute ruler. Suspicious that his once-powerful deputy, and cousin, Mahattaya, had been suborned by Indian intelligence, Prabhakaran had him arrested and tortured to death. In 1995 Sri Lankan forces launched a massive campaign and the LTTE was expelled from Jaffna.
In 2001 both sides called a ceasefire, but after nearly four years of brittle peace, fighting again erupted. Prabhakaran had transformed the Tigers from an archetypal guerilla outfit into a conventional army, but this may ultimately have proved to be his downfall.
Fears remain that LTTE will continue an underground war.
Prabhakaran had two sons and a daughter. He was said to be grooming the elder son, Charles Anthony, as heir; he has been reported dead.
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