> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Who Made Visuvananthathevan and 22 Others Disappear? - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/who-made-visuvananthathevan-and-22-others-disappear-a-40-year-mystery-and-an-unproven-accusation-against-the-ltte/ - Published: 2026-10-15T15:17:17.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-15T15:22:26.000Z - Author: Aruliniyan Mahalingam - Tags: JM Exclusive, October 2026 **By Aruliniyan Mahalingam** **JAFFNA, Sri Lanka —** Between 6:30 and 7 p.m. on Oct. 15, 1986, a fishing trawler carrying about 23 people left the Karaiyoor shore at Gurunagar, on the edge of Jaffna town, for Delft Island, a crossing of a few hours. The boat never reached Delft, and no trace of it or of anyone aboard has been found since. Among the passengers was Visuvalingam Visuvananthathevan, 33, an engineer and Marxist organizer who had founded two small Tamil left-wing movements, the National Liberation Front of Tamil Eelam, or NLFT, and the People’s Liberation Front of Tamil Eelam, or PLFT. With him were two PLFT members: Roy Johnson Santhampillai, known as Kannan, from Murunkanpiddy in Mannar, and Naresh Sharma, known as Visu, from Karainagar. The others were about 20 civilians who had been waiting on the shore for a boat to India and were allowed aboard. No list of their names exists, and their families have never been identified. For four decades, Mr.Visuvananthathevan’s former comrades have said the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam most likely seized the boat and killed everyone on it. Balasingam Balasuriyan, who worked with him for six years in Jaffna and Chennai, India, repeated that view this week in a Tamil-language Facebook post marking the 40th anniversary of the disappearance. A Jaffna Monitor examination found that the accusation rests on inference from the Tigers’ conduct in 1986\. No witness, document, body, or piece of wreckage supports it. Two men who held senior positions in the Tigers at the time said the movement never discussed the boat’s disappearance. A longtime Karaiyoor resident said the sea may have taken it. Accounts compiled by Mr. Visuvananthathevan’s own associates contain details that weigh against both an accident and an attack by government forces. No government, court or armed group has ever accounted for the passengers. This account is based on interviews with the two former Tiger officials and a Karaiyoor resident; Mr. Balasuriyan’s published writings and this week’s statement; recollections published by other associates; a tribute issued by surviving PLFT members on the 20th anniversary in 2006; and a roll of the movement’s dead compiled by surviving members. ## **The last day** ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/10/who-made-visuvananthathevan-an-651c86-1-1.jpg) Naresh Sharma, who disappeared alongside Visuvanandadevan during the ill-fated boat journey on Oct. 15, 1986. Mr. Visuvananthathevan traveled from Chennai to Jaffna in September 1986\. Mr. Balasuriyan, who shared a house with the family in Chennai’s Anna Nagar district, has said the trip had two purposes. The deadline to redeem land Mr. Visuvanandadevan had mortgaged around 1981 had passed, and he had organizing to do for the PLFT, which had split from the NLFT eight months earlier. Anandhi Balasuriyan, who lived in the same house, has recalled that before he left, he came out of his room holding his 10-month-old daughter, Sindhu, and asked her to look after the child and his wife, Jeyalakshmi, until he returned. He told the Indian writer S. V. Rajadurai he would be back in two weeks. On the morning of Oct. 15, he was at his wife’s family home in Kondavil, talking politics with Shanmugam Subramaniam, a veteran Marxist who had broken with him years earlier over his support for a separate Tamil state. Mr. Subramaniam later wrote that the two reconciled during that visit and that Mr. Visuvananthathevan agreed his future work needed party discipline. According to the 2006 tribute, the three PLFT members chose to sail from the Jaffna town shore by way of Delft because the Tigers were hunting members of rival groups, and the usual departure points on the peninsula’s northern coast were too dangerous. They traveled as ordinary passengers and kept the trip secret. The tribute describes the sky that evening as heavy and overcast. ## **The case against the Tigers** The suspicion draws on the Tigers’ record that year. In late April 1986, the Tigers attacked the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization, or TELO, and in early May they killed its leader, Sri Sabaratnam, at Kondavil, the village where Mr. Visuvananthathevan spent his last morning five months later. Tiger cadres hunted TELO members across the peninsula in the weeks that followed. Mr. Visuvananthathevan had been at odds with the Tigers for years. When Tiger gunmen shot Sathasivam Sivashanmugamoorthy, known as Sundaram, a leader of the People’s Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam, at a Jaffna printing press on Jan. 2, 1982, Mr. Visuvananthathevan was one of only two people to condemn the killing in leaflets, according to Mr. Balasuriyan. His friend Nalliah Thayaparan has said that in India, Mr. Visuvananthathevan sheltered young fighters who had fled the Tigers and other armed groups, protected members of the dissident group Theepori, and paid for the Chennai printing of Puthiyathor Ulagam, a novel depicting abuses inside the militant movement. The NLFT’s journal, Ilakku, published a critique of the Tigers’ politics. The front had been targeted before. Mr. Balasuriyan has said that on March 19, 1985, Tiger cadres in Chennai abducted Akilan, an NLFT member who handled the front’s public work there, and tortured him for information about its leaders and where they lived. He escaped several days later. The movement’s losses after 1986 have reinforced his comrades’ belief. A roll of 31 dead NLFT and PLFT members, compiled by surviving members, records that 17 were abducted by the Tigers in 1989 and 1990, most from their homes in villages around Karaveddy and Vadamarachchi, and killed. They include Rajaruntham, known as Thavamannai, taken from his home in Kalluvam, Mr. Visuvananthathevan’s village, and Anthonypillai Rajees, who had lived with the Visuvananthathevan family in Chennai and was taken from his home in Tellippalai on Sept. 1, 1990\. The roll attributes one death to TELO, one to PLOTE and at least five to the Sri Lankan Army. Mr. Balasuriyan has concluded that men posing as passengers could have taken control of the trawler and killed those aboard. He has acknowledged that he has no evidence that this happened. ## **What former Tigers say** Jaffna Monitor interviewed two former senior members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who held positions of authority within the organisation in 1986\. Both agreed to discuss their former roles but requested anonymity, saying they now lead quiet, private lives and did not wish to be drawn into the public spotlight. Both said they learned at the time that the boat carrying Mr. Visuvananthathevan had disappeared, but neither recalled the incident being discussed within the movement, even in hushed conversations. Given their senior positions, they said, they would have expected to hear at least whispers about such an operation had the Tigers been responsible. One said that if the boat had disappeared after reaching Delft, he would have suspected the Tigers, because Ganam, the commander then responsible for the Jaffna islands, was capable of such an operation. But the boat never reached Delft, he said. The other said the Tigers would not have killed some 20 civilians to get at Mr. Visuvananthathevan and two of his members. In 1986, he said, the movement killed its rivals openly, as in its campaign against TELO and, that December, against the Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front, and gave little thought to public opinion. If the Tigers had wanted Mr. Visuvananthathevan dead, he said, they would have killed him and announced it. One of the former commanders also argued that the Tigers had not yet established their naval wing, known as the Sea Tigers, at the time of the disappearance in October 1986\. He said the organisation therefore lacked the maritime capabilities needed to carry out such an operation. ## **The sea** A longtime resident of Karaiyoor, the fishing neighborhood the boat sailed from, said rough weather may explain the loss. October is when the rains arrive, and the sea off Jaffna turns rough, he said, and the boat may simply have gone down. The weather that evening fits part of his account. October falls in Sri Lanka’s second inter-monsoon season, when thunderstorms are common in the north, and the 2006 tribute describes the sky as heavy and overcast when the trawler left. Two details weigh against an accident. Mr. Balasuriyan has said that other boats left Gurunagar for Delft before and after the trawler that evening and arrived safely, and that fishing boats that went out that night came back. His comrades have also said that a sinking with more than 20 people aboard would have left a body or a piece of wreckage on some shore within days. No such find was reported in any account Jaffna Monitor reviewed. ## **The state** The first suspicion among Mr. Visuvananthathevan’s friends fell on government forces. The army had a camp at Gurunagar, near where the boat sailed, and the island waters had a recent record of violence at sea. On May 15, 1985, at least 23 people were killed aboard the passenger ferry Kumudini between Delft and Nainativu in an attack survivors blamed on navy personnel. Early reports reaching India in 1986 said Mr. Visuvananthathevan had been shot at sea or killed by soldiers. One writer who published a poem based on those reports later withdrew it, saying the account was false. According to Mr. Balasuriyan, relatives of Mr. Visuvananthathevan, his two companions and other passengers searched army camps and prisons and established within a few months that none of them was in custody. Some relatives, accompanied by Christian clergy, met the commander of the Gurunagar army camp, who told them no one had been arrested in those waters that day. Mr. Balasuriyan has argued that if the navy had fired on the boat, it would have drifted ashore with the dead and wounded. Mr. Balasuriyan has also dismissed any Indian role, arguing that Mr. Visuvananthathevan’s ties to Indian Marxist-Leninist groups did not make him a target. ## **The man on the boat** Mr. Visuvananthathevan was born on Nov. 29, 1952, in Kalluvam, a farming village near Karaveddy, the eldest of five children. As a student at Udupiddy American Mission College, he joined the Communist campaigns against caste discrimination in the late 1960s. At the University of Peradeniya, where he entered the engineering faculty in 1970, classmates called him “Kutti Mao,” or Little Mao. He spoke fluent Sinhala and sold cyclostyled party pamphlets from a cloth bag. He helped build the Ceylon Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), which broke with N. Shanmugathasan in 1972, and the Tamil People’s Democratic Front, which the party set up in 1975\. He worked as an engineer at the Lanka Cement factory in Kankesanthurai, where he met his wife. Both were dismissed in 1982, four months after they married; friends give differing accounts of why. After the anti-Tamil pogrom of July 1983, he turned the front into the NLFT, which backed a separate Tamil Eelam as a step toward revolution across the island. At its height, the NLFT had a few hundred members, according to Mr. Balasuriyan. It split in January 1986, and he formed the PLFT. Those who knew him disagree about his politics. Mr. Subramaniam has called his plan to seize the north and east as a base for an islandwide socialist revolution “utopian” and has criticized the NLFT’s bank robberies. The scholar M. A. Nuhman has reached a similar judgment. ## **Unanswered questions** Jeyalakshmi Visuvanandadevan was in Chennai when the boat disappeared, and it was weeks before anyone told her. Sindhu turned 1 on Nov. 12, 1986\. Her father was not there. In early 1987, Mr. Balasuriyan took them to London, traveling via Mumbai and New Delhi. By the early 1990s, the NLFT and PLFT no longer existed. Much of what could explain the boat’s fate has never been asked of anyone in a position to know. The name of the trawler’s owner is not known, and neither is the name of the man at its helm. Nobody has recorded who the civilian passengers were or where they came from. And no one has established whether a body or any part of the boat washed up in the days afterward. In his post this week, Mr. Balasuriyan wrote that four decades later, the people who remember Mr. Visuvananthathevan still do not know who the other passengers were, or whether anyone is still searching for them. He said he believes some of those who know what happened that night are still alive.