Lanka open to recruit rehabilitated Tigers into police force
The Sri Lankan administration is open to recruiting rehabilitated members of the LTTE into its police forces that are by far dominated by the Sinhalese majority community.
Police spokesman superintendent, Ajith Rohana, said the rehabilitated former Tamil Tigers are free to apply to become Sri Lankan police recruits.
"We will not discriminate them. If they have the necessary qualifications they can apply," Rohana told PTI.
He said that among those rehabilitated after the war there could be youth who had been forcibly recruited into the LTTE, and that such ex-members posed no risk.
The LTTE who fought a three-decade long war to establish a separate Tamil homeland in the north and east ran their own police service when they ran a parallel administration.
Sri Lanka has already released the bulk of the 11,000 Tigers who surrendered to government troops at the end of the military campaign in May 2009.
They were provided language and life skills training under rehabilitation. Only around 500 of them are still in detention, rehabilitation officials said.
The Sri Lankan police force is dominated by members of the ethnic Sinhalese majority and only a few thousand of its nearly 90,000 strong police force are from the Tamil ethnic minority.
Sri Lankan police service has recruited some Tamil speaking policemen since the end to the war to serve in the former conflict regions.
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