India ready to help in resolving Lankan crisis: Navy chief

Visakhapatnam, May 19 (ANI): After keeping in mind the safety and protection of civilians in Sri Lanka, Navy Chief Admiral Sureesh Mehta on Tuesday said that the Navy was ready to help in resolving the situation as a humanitarian issue.

Mehta further said that the civilians who are fleeing from the battle zone would be escorted and moved out to a safe area by the Indian Navy.

"As far as our stand is concerned, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) was always a banned organisation. It is an internal matter of Sri Lanka, as to how it is being resolved. We are very concerned that the civilian population should not anyway be harmed. In that respect, this issue was taken up by the Sri Lankan government and they had listened more or less to what we had to say and taken steps to make sure that the security of the civilian population was restored," Mehta said on the occasion of inducting INS Airavat, India Navy's sixth large ship tank (LST).

Meanwhile, Sri Lanka's military on Tuesday confirmed that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) leader Vellupillai Prabhakaran's body had been found while President Mahinda Rajapaksa had urged Tamils to join in rebuilding a nation, split by a 25-year separatist war.

LTTE's contention was that Tamils had been marginalised by successive governments led by the Sinhalese ethnic majority, which came to power when the island nation became independent in 1948 and took the favoured position Tamils had enjoyed under the British colonial government. (ANI)