The Black Tigers was an elite suicide commando unit of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), specially selected and trained to mount suicide attacks primarily against military, economic and political targets, among them Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa and former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
The first Black Tiger was Vallipuram Vasanthan, who drove a small truck laden with explosives into a Sri Lanka Army (SLA) camp in Nelliady, Jaffna peninsula, on this day in 1987 during the Battle of Nelliady, killing himself and between 39 and 100 Sri Lankan soldiers.
During the earlier phase of the Tamil Tigers’ military campaign, it did not possess the heavy conventional weapons required to attack large camps. To mount such an attack, costly weapons such as artillery pieces, missiles, and fighter-bombers would have been needed – weapons that the LTTE could not afford to purchase. As a result, they decided to resort to asymmetric warfare, creating a special wing to make up for their inadequate weaponry. Consequently, it is not the act itself—killing by suicide—that was the Black Tigers’ original or even main aim, but rather the military impact and its strategic consequences.
Since their formation in 1987 until the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, more than 330 Black Tigers made suicide attacks on air, land and sea, mostly in Sri Lanka. Experts estimated that the Black Tigers had carried out the most of suicide attacks reported around the world by the time the Sri Lankan civil war ended in 2009.
-Wikipedia
Photo Caption: LTTE ‘Black Tigers Day’commemoration at Nelliady, Jaffna, Sri Lanka in 2004 – Wikipedia