Satha Sarachandran was an unlikely international arms dealer. Quiet and studious, he was a software engineer who volunteered at a Toronto youth group.
He had no criminal record. But in 2006, FBI agents caught the 30-year-old Canadian shopping for surface-to-air missiles in Long Island, N.Y., and yesterday afternoon he was sentenced to 26 years in prison. Prosecutors are seeking 25-to 40-year sentences for two more Canadians, Sahilal Sabaratnam and Thiruthanikan Thanigasalam, when they appear in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn on Monday.
All admitted they tried to buy $1-million worth of Russian shoulder-fired missiles and AK-47 assault rifles for a South Asian rebel group.
"The defendants attempted to use this district as a terrorist arms depot," Benton Campbell, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a press release announcing the sentencing of Sarachandran and accomplice Nadarasa Yogarasa, who received 14 years.
Global arms trafficking fuels war, misery and insecurity. It puts weapons into the hands of repressive regimes, rebel groups and terrorists. U.S. prosecutors had asked the judge to impose a severe punishment on the Canadians.
But Sarachandran and his associates were not war profiteers. There is no evidence they stood to make money from their weapons dealing. Instead, they became arms merchants out of idealism, to help a band of rebels with whom they sympathized.
Expert Matt Schroeder said the sentences sought by prosecutors were not out of line considering the grave threat posed by the illicit trafficking of missiles. "I think it's perfectly reasonable to levy that kind of punishment."
Said Siemon Wezeman of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "These kinds of things would give a signal, but then you're asking yourself again the questions: Are these kind of people the ones that you should go after? Are these not more or less misguided people?"
The missile plot began as peace talks to end the Sri Lankan civil war were collapsing. When Sri Lankan military jets resumed bombing the northern enclave of the Tamil Tigers, the rebels began seeking weapons to shoot them down.
Surface-to-air missiles are a hot commodity on the black market. Rebel groups want them to repel air strikes and terrorists want them to target commercial aviation, such as the 2002 Strela-2 missile attack on an Israeli airliner in Mombassa, Kenya.
"They're highly sought after," said Mr. Schroeder, manager of the arms sales monitoring project at the Federation of American Scientists.
"Anybody who attempts to acquire missiles on U.S. soil really runs a risk of being nabbed in a sting operation," he said.
But Sarachandran didn't know that.
He was born in northern Sri Lanka, where the troubled island's ethnic Tamil minority is concentrated, and where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebel group was formed in 1976 to fight for independence.
In 1989, his father Shunmugan left for Canada. A civil engineer and physics teacher, Shunmugan worked as a cook and cashier until his wife and children joined him three years later.
At high school, Sarachandran helped form a support group for Tamil students, and during his first year at the University of Windsor, where he studied computer science, he became active in the Tamil Students Association. The association was a social and cultural club, but the students were also sensitive to events in Sri Lanka and invited speakers to lecture them on the origins of the conflict and the history of the Tamil people.
Sarachandran began volunteering at the Tamil Youth Organization in Scarborough in 2002, serving as a counsellor and helping put together a Tamil soccer team. He was a "leader and role model for the younger Tamil children," his lawyers wrote in a letter to the judge last month.
But he was increasingly troubled by the conflict in his homeland. During a halt in fighting in 2003, he returned to the island with a dozen other youths. They stayed for two weeks, met the rebels and witnessed firsthand the devastation of the war and the abuses committed against ethnic Tamils.
" The trip deeply impacted Sathajhan Sarachandran, as he was exposed to a level of depravation of his fellow Tamil that exceeded the farthest reaches of his imagination," his lawyers Anthony Ricco and Edward Wilford wrote.
A second trip left him more distraught. Upon his return, he helped organize a 2004 rally in Toronto to urge the Canadian government to take action in Sri Lanka. Tens of thousands of Canadian Tamils attended.
Following the South Asian tsunami, as national president of the Canadian Tamil Students Association, Sarachandran helped raise money for humanitarian relief. Those who encountered him then recalled him as polite and dedicated but none were willing to speak about him on the record.
As the war escalated, so did his militancy. He "decided that he wanted to do something to help end the violence," his lawyers wrote, "so he permitted himself to be used by the LTTE in their search for weaponry to arm themselves."
On July 31, 2006, Sarachandran took a flight from Toronto to New York to meet a Tamil man he thought was a representative of an Italian arms dealer. The meeting was arranged by Yogarasa, a 55-year-old German-educated Sri Lankan who had allegedly done previous deals for the rebels. It was a costly mistake because the man they contacted was a longtime FBI informant.
As the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force recorded the meeting, Sarachandran told the informant he was representing the Tamil Tigers, who had asked him to look for weapons that could down the Kfir jets used by the Sri Lankan military.
"Money is not a problem," he said.
Two days later, the informant sent him an email. "Here are photos of what my guy has available," it read. "Let me know if your guys are interested." Attached were photos of the Russian SA-18 Igla missile system.
Such a costly acquisition required the rebels' approval, so on August 10 Thanigasalam flew to Sri Lanka to meet the leaders of the Tamil Tigers. Pottu Amman, the rebel intelligence boss and the mastermind behind the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, oversaw the procurement operation.
When Thanigasalam returned to Toronto with the rebels' consent to proceed with the deal and a shopping list of other weapons, Sarachandran phoned the informant to tell him the news.
There was no point in buying five or 10 missiles, he said, the rebels wanted 50 to 100. "It has to be obtained in bulk," Sarachandran said. "At our rate, if we fire 10 at least two will hit."
They arranged to meet in New York on Aug. 19. This time, four Canadians would be coming from Toronto to inspect the merchandise.
At the U.S. border, the Canadians claimed they were on their way to a bachelor party in Buffalo. There was a slight setback when one of them was turned back because he had a criminal record, but Sarachandran, Thanigasalam and Sabaratnam got in.
They drove the Ford Escape through the night and met their contact at a Dunkin' Donuts in Long Island, then followed an undercover officer to a warehouse to examine one of the missile launchers. It was stored in a rectangular wooden crate.
"It looks like a casket, don't it. You'll put quite a few people in caskets," an undercover officer posing as an arms dealer said.
"Yes," replied Sabaratnam.
They opened one of the boxes and examined the 1.5 -metre launch tube (top). It weighed just over 10 kilograms and was labelled with Cyrillic lettering that identified it as a Russianmade 9P39 SA-18 Igla (Russian for "needle"). They also examined two AK-47s.
"This is all excellent stuff," Thanigasalam told the others in Tamil. "We will be able to give a good thrashing."
They made a deal: 10 missile launchers, 20 missiles, 500 AK-47s and the services of a trainer for US$937,500. Thanigasalam said the arms had to be delivered to a rebel ship in the Indian Ocean. Then one of the undercover officers gave a signal and police moved in to make the arrests.
In Toronto, meanwhile, the RCMP arrested three more Canadians: Piratheepan Nadarajah, Ramanan Mylvaganam and Suresh Sriskandarajah, the former president of the University of Waterloo Tamil Students Association. (They are currently awaiting extradition to the United States.)
When police searched Sarachandran's home in Scarborough, they found the Tamil Tigers flag, a framed portrait of LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran and a "vast quantity" of rebel propaganda. The RCMP also found photographs that showed Sarachandran at a rebel camp in Sri Lanka holding a heavy machine gun, lying prone firing a rifle, aboard a rebel ship and posing with a uniformed guerrilla.
His computer had been used for online searches for rifle-scopes and night-vision goggles. A thumb drive contained videos on unmanned aerial vehicles with attack capabilities. A search of his email account showed that in 2005, he had discussed a request for high-tech military equipment for border surveillance, artillery fire support and radio encryption.
At first, Sarachandran claimed he had only taken part under duress because his parents had been kidnapped, but it was a fabrication and he pleaded guilty last January. The others quickly followed.
All shared similar backgrounds.
Thanigasalam is a 43-year-old immigrant from Sri Lanka with a wife and two children in Toronto. He had no prior record, although prosecutors said he and Sarachandran "had engaged in multiple previous efforts to obtain high-tech equipment for the LTTE."
Sabaratnam, 30, immigrated to Canada from Sri Lanka at age nine and was a business development associate at TD Waterhouse in Toronto and had served briefly as communications director of the Canadian Tamil Congress. He was engaged to be married when he was arrested. He said he was recruited into the operation at the last minute by Thanigasalam, his brother-in-law.
"Most of the people, not all of them, but most of the people that are busted in these stings are amateurs that are out for a quick buck," Mr. Schroeder said. "Most of the time their primary motivation is monetary. That's not always the case."
Mr. Wezeman of the Stockholm institute's arms transfers program said those involved in illicit arms trafficking are a mix of entrepreneurs and agents acting for rebel or terrorist groups. "It may include student-type of people. People are young, people want to do something, they want to make a difference," he said. "They are still young enough to be moulded, or tricked."
The youngest of the missile ring, Sarachandran had wanted to live an honest life and make his parents proud, according to his attorneys. Instead, he became an arms merchant for his cause.
"During the course of his young life," the lawyers wrote, "he was simply unable to resolve his emotional response to horrific violence in a more productive positive manner."
sbell@nationalpost.com
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