Selvarasa Pathmanathan
Sri Lankan criminal (born 1955)
Shanmugam Kumaran Tharmalingam (Tamil: ஷண்முகம் குமாரன் தர்மலிங்கம்; alias Selvarasa Pathmanathan, Kumaran Pathmanathan, or simply KP; born 6 April 1955) is a former prominent member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Pathmanathan was on Interpol's most wanted list for various charges including arms smuggling and criminal conspiracy. He is also wanted by India's law enforcement agencies in connection with the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and for violation of the Terrorist Act and the Indian Explosive Act. He was arrested on 5 August 2009. Pathmanathan was released from prison on 17 October 2012, when the complaints against him by Sri Lanka were withdrawn.
Early life
Little information is available on Pathmanthan's early life. He was born Shanmugam Kumaran Tharmalingam on 6 April 1955 in the town of Kankesanthurai in the Jaffna District of Ceylon. Pathmanathan, who can converse in Tamil, English, French and Sinhala is known to have left Sri Lanka in 1983.
Aliases
Pathmanathan is known to use more than 23 aliases and masks. In addition, his last name can be spelled as Padmanadan or Pathmanaban or Pathmanadan or Pathmanathan, hence there are numerous variations of his name.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Selvarasa Pathmanathan” as sri Lankan criminal (born 1955). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1400560. VIAF identifies the subject as 220580603. The Library of Congress control number is n2012203687. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1955, 1991, 2009 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Selvarasa Pathmanathan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.