Tamil Tiger chief Vellupillai Prabhakaran's luxurious lifestyle has been made public through photos from a family album allegedly found by Sri Lankan troops in his hide-out in Puthukudiyiruppu. The defense ministry, which released the photos with an accompanying commentary, said that the images showed the “dark corners of Mr Prabhakaran's duplicitous and pampered lifestyle” as the very Tamil people he was fighting for lived in abject war-induced poverty in the north of the island nation. The photographs were shown to President Mahinda Rajapaksa when he visited Kilinochchi which was the rebels' political and administrative capital in April. The album had pictures of Prabhakaran – dubbed a “smiling psychopath” by the ministry – relaxing with his aged mother, father, Velupillai, wife tastefully dressed Mathivathani and children, Charles Anthony, Thuvaraka and Balachandran. There were pictures of family outings, birthday parties, family dinners, children playing with expensive toys and a day out in the sea. In one picture, Prabhakaran is seen gamboling in a swimming pool with one of his sons – all his three children are now grown up and the youngest boy, Balachandran, is in his mid teens. Little was known about Prabhakaran's family life. Only one family picture, nearly two decades ago, has ever been released. It was known that he had married in Tamil Nadu and had three children. Indian journalist Anita Pratap was the only one who had previously averred to Prabhakaran's little-known penchant for luxury. In her book ‘Island of Blood,' Pratap wrote that the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was fond of good non-vegetarian food, especially Chinese food. A Malayali? Earlier this month, the Economic Times of India interviewed a 77-year-old woman, Janaki Amma, in her lower middle class residence about 20 km from Kollam in the southern Indian state of Kerala, who claimed Prabhakaran, son of her maternal uncle, Vellupillai, is a Malayali. “Velupillai was one of five brothers and two sisters, one of who was my mother Nani Amma”, she says. That makes her the first cousin of Prabhakaran, who she has never met. “My uncle Velupillai last came to Kollam for my grandfather's funeral when I was a 12-year-old,” she told the paper. “Since then, I have not seen him. He used to regularly send money to my mother, but after my mother's demise that stopped. It used to be Rs. 50 per month, but that was a princely amount those days”, reminisces Janaki Amma. She showed the paper a post card that her uncle had sent from Jaffna. Sent on 18.12.1953, the address read: R Velupillai, Vale Beeda Store, 224, KKS Road, Jaffna. “After settling in Jaffna, my uncle's children would obviously have studied in Tamil medium and been brought up in that culture, quite naturally,” Amma said, trying to explain how Prabhakaran might have taken to the Lanka Tamil separatist cause and passed off as a Tamil.
