TELO used schoolboy to test explosive device

[TamilNet, Friday, 19 March 1999, 17:19 GMT]
A cadre of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organisation (TELO), a Tamil paramilitary group assisting the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) and the Special Task Force (STF), was ordered by the Batticaloa district court today to pay sixty thousand rupees as compensation to a student whose right hand was blown off by a parcel bomb on October 19, 1996.

Mr.K .Thadchanamoorthy, additional distrcit judge for Batticaloa, said in his sentence that the compensation means little when one considers the damage caused to the student's future by the TELO cadre.

Court sources said the sentence was extenuated due to the fact that one of the accused in the case died last year, that the TELO cadre had pleaded guilty and that he was now destitute.

Two TELO cadres, Seenithamby Vimalendran and Seenithamby Rajendran, who were working for the Special Task Force in Aaraiampathy, 8 kilometres south of Batticaloa, had seen a parcel abandoned close to their camp.

Strongly suspecting it to be an explosive device, the TELO cadres had called a school boy, Ramachandran Vasuthevan, 16, who was passing by and had ordered him to open the parcel.

The explosive device had blown off the student's hand when he had tried to do so.

The judge noted in his sentence that the crime committed by the TELO cadres was particularly heinous as they had compelled the school boy to open the parcel, knowing that it was an explosive device.

Seenithamby Vimalendran died last year.