Velupillai Prabhakaran, his wife and their three children are dead, all of them perishing in the final stages of Sri Lanka’s war in 2009, Prabhakaran’s elder brother Velupillai Manoharan has declared publicly for the first time.
Manoharan told the Jaffna Monitor magazine’s latest issue that he was stating this to end what he said was a huge scam perpetrated by a section of the Tamil diaspora to cheat money from unsuspecting Tamils by insisting that Prabhakaran and some of his family members were still alive.
“As Prabhakaran’s elder brother, I felt it was my responsibility to end this nonsense,” Manoharan, who is based in Denmark, told the fortnightly journal. “Additionally, there have been false rumours that my brother is alive and living abroad.”
Manoharan spoke days after organising his family’s first public commemoration of the death of Prabhakaran and his family at the DGI Huset Conference Centre in Denmark on 18 May that was attended by a large number of Sri Lankan Tamils.
In recent months, a young Tamil woman living in the West had falsely claimed to be Prabhakaran’s daughter Thuvaraga (Dwarka), “deceiving the diaspora out of millions of dollars”, Manoharan said. “As Prabhakaran’s elder brother, I have a responsibility to reveal the truth about what happened to him and his family. If we do not speak out, these false narratives will dominate, and everyone will believe this nonsense,” he said.
n his interview, Manoharan urged Tamils to stop believing that Prabhakaran and his family were somehow and somewhere alive. “My brother Prabhakaran and his entire family are no more. It is essential to accept this reality. Please do not fall prey to these fraudsters who claim to be my brother’s family. These individuals are exploiting your emotions and the legacy of my brother for their own gains.”
The Federal
