To his detractors, the founder of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) was little more than a ruthless terrorist who pioneered the use of suicide bombings to assassinate two heads of state, viciously annihilated his own Tamil critics and stubbornly refused any compromise that might have led to peace. For nearly 30 years, the moustachioed commander's brutal war to create an independent 'Eelam' (homeland) for Sri Lanka's minority Tamils teetered on the often thin line between a struggle for liberation and outright terrorism. He was killed in a rocket attack while trying to flee the combat zone, with his body floating among the mangroves until a soldier found him and confirmed his death.If there was ever a competition to find the person who summed up the adage which says that 'one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter', then Velupillai Prabhakaran, the rotund but fearsome leader of the Tamil Tigers, would have been a strong candidate. On Prabhakaran was finally tracked down as the Sri Lankan Army launched successful offensives that drove the LTTE into defeat. In 1991 the LTTE assassinated President Rajiv Gandhi of India in Tamil Nadu in response to his deployment of the Indian Army against the LTTE in Sri Lanka in hopes of preventing Tamils from rising up in India, and in 1993 they killed President Ranasinghe Premadasa of Sri Lanka in a suicide bombing. Prabhakaran was known as a terrorist mastermind, using suicide bombers to carry out terrorist attacks against the Buddhist Sinhalese population as well as ordering his fighters to take no prisoners while attacking enemies. He knew that peaceful protests would be crushed and never heard, so he resorted to militarism. His forces used Russian, Chinese, and American weapons and were so powerful that they managed to have their own air force and an army of suicide bombers. On 23 July 1983 the Sri Lankan Civil War broke out between his Tamil Tigers and the government, leading to over 25 years of armed conflict on the island of Sri Lanka between his rebels and the government. He was responsible for the assassination of Alfred Duraiappah, the Protestant Tamil mayor of Jaffna, accusing him of being a collaborator with the government against the Tamils.

Prabhakaran was angered by the Buddhist Sinhalese majority's discrimination against Hindu Tamils, and he formed the Tamil Tigers rebel group in 1976 so that the Tamils could have their own land. Velupillai Prabhakaran was born on 26 November 1954 in Valvettithurai, Dominion of Ceylon, United Kingdom (present-day Sri Lanka) to a family of Hindu Tamils. He was killed in 2009 in a rocket attack by the Sri Lankan Army as they crushed the LTTE. Velupillai Prabhakaran (26 November 1954-) was the founder and leader of the Tamil Tigers (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE), a terrorist group that sought to secede from Sri Lanka and create a state for Tamils on the northern and eastern parts of the island.

Tamil eelam leader prabhakaran