A Canadian has pleaded guilty in a New York court to plotting to supply materials to a “foreign terrorist organization,” according to the FBI.
Ramanan Mylvaganam, 35, was extradited three years ago to the United States — where he lived previously — when he was charged with trying to purchase equipment to send to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a Tamil independence organization named as a terrorist group by both Canada and the U.S.
“Material support here for foreign terrorist organizations can have lethal consequences. That is why the FBI takes seriously the responsibility to prevent it and (we) do all we can to protect the safety of people around the globe,” FBI assistant director Janice Fedarcyk said in a statement.
Mylvaganam is a computer engineer from Mississauga, Ont., and served on the executive of the University of Waterloo’s Tamil association while he was a student there.
He was arrested in Toronto in 2006 with two other Canadians, Piratheepan Nadarajah and Suresh Sriskandarajah, following a joint FBI-RCMP investigation called Project O-Needle. Sriskandarajah, also know as Waterloo Suresh, was listed on the same indictment as Mylvaganam, but neither Sriskandarajah nor Nadarajah have pleaded guilty.
Mylvaganam pleaded guilty on Wednesday to plotting to buy about $22,000 of submarine design software from a U.K. company in 2006, as well as helping another person purchase electronics. He also tried to purchase night-vision goggles from an unnamed company in B.C.
He told the company that the equipment was for a university project. Prosecutors say the materials were to be sent to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam — commonly known as the Tamil Tigers — an organization founded in 1976 to fight for an independent Tamil state in northern Sri Lanka.
The rebels raised money from around the world to fund the war. The Sri Lankan civil war and the Tamil Tigers’ decades-long fight for independence ended in 2009 when the rebel group admitted defeat.
The FBI designated the organization a terrorist group in 1997 and holds the organization responsible for about 200 suicide bombings and numerous political assassinations over the past two decades. The Tigers, which had a major fundraising operation in Toronto and Montreal, was added to Canada’s list of banned terrorist organizations in 2006.
Three Canadians serving life sentences for attempting to buy weapons for the Tamil Tigers signed an open letter last fall acknowledging they were wrong and renouncing political violence.
Mylvaganam will face up to 15 years in prison when he is sentenced in May, the Vancouver Sun reports.
