Having intercepted the LTTE vessel, on January 13, 1993, far from the Indian coast, Coast Guard Ship Vivek, backed by INS Kirpan, had forced the LTTE crew to bring it to a point, eight nautical miles off Egmore, and north of Madras, to facilitate an inspection. They started with MV Ahat (Yahata) on January 16, 1993. The government of Sri Lanka succeeded in sinking most if not all of the LTTE ships, both hired and owned by LTTE. He was convicted by Thai authorities but mysteriously disappeared from Thailand after an intervention by a woman posing as a representative of Amnesty International who had apparently got the Thai authorities to deport him to Norway. The tourist operation of Lawrence was a cover up for smuggling arms via the Andaman Islands to the LTTE. An American and a Thai had been co-owners of this yard. They searched his shipyard and found the boat. The authorities found instead of oil, sophisticated equipment meant for LTTE, such as radar and sonar. He had been arrested in an operation against oil smugglers. Lawrence a Jaffna born Tamil with a Norwegian passport. In June 2000 Thai police had stumbled on a half built submersible in a Phuket shipyard. KP is at present running a boat manufacturing plant in an East Asian country, complained Sri Lanka in its aide memoir of 2009. Pathmanathan had established a state-of-the-art boatyard in Thailand, which manufactured over a dozen different boats, including mini-submarines and suicide boats, said Wikipedia. KP had also built a fleet of commercial boats, the only separatist group to be so equipped. “Sometimes we would send a container to India and former Chief Minister would clear the container and hand over to us,” The containers were then taken by boat to Valvettiturai. The weapons shipments went to Jaffna via India. Anyone can operate ships, so it is a normal operation,” he said adding that there were many markets all over the world to buy weapons. He said it was not difficult to acquire the ships at the time. He said that former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MG Ramachandran, known as MGR, provided the money to buy the ships and weapons. In an interview to Colombo Page on May 22, 2017, KP provided some new information.
The ships were handled by R, living in Canada who had studied navigation. He said a double accountant, living in US, mostly purchased ships out of Japan. They are masters in clandestine and compartmentalized operations. Rohan Gunaratne said that the LTTE shipping and procurement staffers were highly skilled. Some of them had done training at the Lal Bahadur Shastri Nautical Engineering College in Mumbai.
There were many merchant navy officers, sailors and engineers from Valvettiturai and elsewhere in the north east of Sri Lanka, available to the LTTE. By 2000, there were 11 well equipped ships, capable of transoceanic long distance sailing, for smuggling LTTE had 13 ships in 2003. These were officially to carry timber and grain KP together with a UK based activists then purchased 11 merchant vessels. Five or six small freighters were added to the fleet, working under several dummy companies with offices in Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong. KP was solely responsible for purchase of new ships for the LTTE.
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