Prabhakaran: The Life and Death of a Tiger !!!

The portly rebel leader with the bushy mustache and trusty Browning pistol turned a small band of poorly armed guerrillas into one of the world's most sophisticated and ruthless insurgencies.

But Velupillai Prabhakaran also made a series of mistakes that led the Tamil Tigers to total defeat and his own death at age 54.
At the height of his power, Prabhakaran ruled as a virtual dictator over a shadow state of hundreds of thousands of people in northern Sri Lanka with its own flag, police and court system.

Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, HO, FileAP Photo - FILE - In this Nov. 27, 2006 handout file photo provided by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Tamil Tiger rebels, is seen after delivering his annual speech from an undisclosed location in rebel controlled north Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan military officials say Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed Monday, May 18, 2009 by government forces.

Two officials confirmed Prabhakaran's death. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, HO, FileAP Photo - FILE - In this Nov. 27, 2008 handout file photo provided by Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels, delivers his annual address to Sri Lanka's Tamil minority at an undisclosed location near Colombo, Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan military officials say Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed Monday, May 18, 2009 by government forces. Two officials confirmed Prabhakaran's death.

Sri Lanka said Monday that it had finished off the last of the rebels in the northern war zone and killed Prabhakaran and his top deputies.

To his followers, Velupillai Prabhakaran (pronounced ve-LU-pi-lay PRAH-bah-ka-ran) was the steadfast heart of the battle to establish a breakaway state for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority. But his many detractors saw him as the brutal ruler of a suicide cult who repeatedly sabotaged peace deals in pursuit of power.

In more than a quarter-century of civil war, his Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam perfected the art of suicide bombings, assassinated top politicians including former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, and fought the Sri Lankan government to a near-standstill.

Prabhakaran's guerrilla force was armed with heavy artillery, a rudimentary air wing that once bombed Colombo's international airport, and a squad of suicide attackers. Its navy consisted of small attack craft, suicide boats laden with explosives, crude submarines and huge smuggling ships.

The rebels reportedly earned as much as $300 million a year from arms and drug smuggling, fake charities and donations from Tamil expatriates.

Prabhakaran rarely appeared in public, preferring to communicate via radio addresses delivered every November.

Tamil Tiger troops, some forcibly recruited when they were children, saw Prabhakaran as their unquestioned leader. He ordered them to abstain from sex, cut personal ties and carry glass vials of cyanide on a necklace so they could kill themselves upon capture.

"He is their brain. He is their heart. He is their god. He is their soul. And the whole organization runs around him," said Indian journalist M.R. Narayan Swamy, who wrote a biography of Prabhakaran.

The rebel leader orchestrated surprise attacks on Sri Lankan bases that killed hundreds of troops and retaliated against government offensives with devastating counterattacks.

The group's penchant for suicide attacks - including the 1998 bombing of the Temple of the Tooth, Sri Lanka's holiest Buddhist shrine - led the United States, European Union and India to outlaw it as a terror organization. The group also assassinated several politicians, including former President Ranasinghe Premadasa.

Though Prabhakaran was sometimes hailed as a master strategist, he also made a series of misjudgments that eventually led to his downfall.

He alienated his strongest allies in India by sending a female suicide bomber to kill Gandhi in 1991, apparent retaliation for sending an Indian peacekeeping mission to Sri Lanka that turned sour.

During negotiations that followed a 2002 cease-fire, he rejected a deal that would have given the rebels broad autonomy over the north and east but not full independence. It was widely seen as the best deal he could ever get.

Prabhakaran said he could not accept anything less than a separate Tamil state, dubbed Eelam. "Thousands of my boys have laid down their lives for Eelam," he told Indian journalist Anita Pratap in 1990. "Their death cannot be in vain."

In 2004, a top commander known as Col. Karuna ran afoul of the Tiger leadership and split from the group with thousands of his fighters.

Prabhakaran called a Tamil boycott of the 2005 presidential election, which helped propel the hard-line Mahinda Rajapaksa to victory. After new peace talks failed, the rebels cut off the water supply to more than 60,000 people in eastern Sri Lanka, provoking an unrelenting government offensive that drove the group out of the east, captured their administrative capital of Kilinochchi, and eventually destroyed them on the battlefield.

Prabhakaran was born on Nov. 26, 1954, and grew up on the Jaffna peninsula, the Tamil minority's cultural heartland, amid the emerging independence movement. Many Tamils felt their culture and rights had been marginalized by governments dominated by the Sinhalese majority and wanted a country of their own.

He rose to prominence after killing the mayor of Jaffna in 1975 and used his new militant credentials to create the Tamil Tigers. He and many of his fighters received training from sympathizers in neighboring India, according to Swamy.

The militants waged increasingly brazen attacks against the government in the north, capped by a 1983 ambush that killed 13 soldiers and sparked anti-Tamil riots in Colombo that killed an estimated 2,000 people and are generally seen as the start of the war.

Even as he fought the government, Prabhakaran waged war on rival Tamil militant organizations - and any Tamils who dared criticize him - consolidating power and making his group the unquestioned representative of the minority's political aspirations.

Prabhakaran has largely led the Tamil Tigers from fortified underground bunkers rather than the front lines.

"I am like a spider at the center of the web," he told .

On the run for decades, Prabhakaran reportedly destroyed all photos of himself, leaving police referring to an outdated school picture in their hunt for him.

But in later years, photos surfaced of him meeting with commandos before suicide missions or laying wreaths at the funerals of slain fighters. He held a rare news conference in 2002, but went underground again when a cease-fire broke down three years ago.

Prabhakaran met his wife, Madivadani, in 1984 after she and eight other Tamil students protesting the government defied his orders to end a hunger strike. The couple had three children, a daughter, Dwarka, and sons Balachandran and Charles Anthony, who was killed in fighting Monday.