Prabhakaran raised formidable force before demise

Sri Lankan people beat a drum as they celebrate their country's military victory against the Tamil Tigers in Colombo yesterday. Photo: AFP

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.
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.