The drillship ‘Chikyu’ has been mobilised

Economic Development Minister Basil Rajapaksa announced over the weekend that Cairn Lanka (Private) Ltd, a fully owned subsidy of Cairn India which won Sri Lanka’s first offshore oil exploratory licence, has commenced operations to drill oil exploratory wells in the Mannar basin.

According to earlier analysis of the government, there is a 60 percent possibility that commercially viable hydrocarbon deposits would be found on Sri Lanka’s side of the Mannar basin. Rajapaksa has said if Sri Lanka was successful in locating oil, it would no longer have to depend on oil imports.

The exploration area is 3,000 square km with water depths ranging from 400 metres to 1,900 metres. Cairn Lanka had signed the Petroleum Resource Agreement with the Sri Lankan government in July 2008 to explore oil and natural gas in the Mannar Basin with an investment of US$ 110 million.

The long drawn out negotiations to clinch the joint venture between National Thermal Power Corporation of India (NTPC) and the Ceylon Electricity Board to build Sri Lanka’s second coal power plant at Sampoor, Trincomalee has finally come to fruition with Power and Energy Ministry Secretary M.M.C. Ferdinando Friday initialing the all-important .Implementation Agreement in New Delhi last Friday with his counterparts there.

According to authoritative sources out of at least five different agreements pertaining to the 500 MW first phase of the project running to hundreds of pages had been held up since they were finalized more than an year ago over some terms in the implementation agreement.

Could there be a link between Norway-based LTTE operatives and Anders Behring Breivik, who bombed the Norwegian government headquarters in Oslo and wiped out a youth group on a nearby island on July 22 killing over 80 civilians?

Responding to a query by The Island, informed sources said that the Norwegian could have had a link with the LTTEactivists in Norway.

Breivik, in his 1,518 manifesto, which was released hours before he carried out the massacre, said had felt that Europe should follow the LTTE example of expelling the Muslims from Sri Lanka. He had interpreted the expulsion of Muslims from the North in October/November 1990, by the LTTE at gun point, as a move by the government of Sri Lanka to drive out the Muslim community.

Sri Lanka alleges that the LTTE is making a major effort to de-list from the EU terrorism list, while pursuing separatist agenda.

In the wake of LTTE bid, the Government of Sri Lanka on July 28, 2011 urged the European Union (EU) to list front organizations of the LTTE as terrorist entities, as the grouping had done the LTTE since 2006.

This call was made, as the EU through Council Implementing Regulation (EU) No 687/2011 of 18 July 2011 published in the official journal of the European Union, on 19 July 2011, listed the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as a terrorist entity.

The EU terrorist re-listings made in terms of article 2 (3) of Council Regulation (EC)

No. 2580/2001 of 07 December 2001 on specific restrictive measures directed against certain persons and entities with a view to combating terrorism, proscribes organizations listed operating in EU member countries and freezes the assets. The regulation noted that, "the Council has carried out a complete review of the list of persons, groups and entities to which Regulation (EC) No 2580/2001 applies, as required by Article 2(3) of that Regulation", " has provided all the persons, groups and entities for which it was practically possible with statements of reasons explaining why they were listed in Implementing Regulation (EU) No 83/2011" and "took account of observations submitted to it by the persons, groups and entities concerned".

In the wake of UK based Channel 4 telecasting ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’, British Tamils are stepping up their propaganda campaign targeting Sri Lanka. The campaign goes parallel to the UK-headquartered Global Tamil Forum (GTF) exploiting its contacts with the British Conservative and Labour parties to push for international war crimes probe.

A Norwegian based LTTE leader Perinpanayagam Sivaparan, known by his nom de guerre as Nediyawan, has been arrested and was produced in an Oslo court on Wednesday and Thursday, the Norwegian media reported.

The Norway News website said that Nediyawan, a prominent figure and "new leader" of the LTTE is being questioned over LTTE activities in the Netherlands.

A Dutch judge and five Dutch Defence Attorneys are in Norway to interrogate the LTTE Leader Nediyavan, who is a resident of Norway.