When the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) launched an air assault on a Sri Lankan military base close to Colombo on March 26, using two crude aircraft, it was generally perceived by many as a one-off incident. Since then, however, the Tigers have demonstrated their ability to conduct three successful air-borne attacks in less than a month. For the first time in this bloody conflict spanning over two decades, the Tigers have used the aerial medium to launch its strikes. The question is are the Tigers going beyond mere air power? Are they, for instance, seriously looking at what is termed “the fourth dimension of warfare” — space?

At this stage, this may appear a gross exaggeration to assume that the LTTE is interested in developing its Tamileelam Air Force (TAF), or ‘Vaanpuliga’, into an aerospace force. But, at the same time, a fact that cannot — and should not — be overlooked is that the Tigers are intelligently making use of commercially available space technologies. Recently, it has emerged that this outfit has been illegally using a satellite of the US giant, Intelsat, to beam its radio and TV broadcasts.

This signal piracy is a violation of the laws of both the US and Sri Lanka. Immediately after learning about this, the satellite company started pursuing a number of technical alternatives to halt these illegal transmissions. Intelsat had to engage with the Sri Lankan authorities also to halt this unauthorised use of its satellite. However, the job was not easy and it took almost ten days for Intelsat to shut down LTTE’s radio and television broadcasts. Predictably, the LTTE spokesman claimed that they were accessing the satellite services legally and were not involved in any form of signal piracy. As per reports in March 2005, the Tigers had announced that they were using Europe Star 1 satellite, which has since been re-named Intelsat 12 (IS-12), to uplink their television programmes. However, it is not clear whether the Tigers had ‘right to use’ for the satellite services through a proxy user or in their ‘official’ capacity.

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