Coast guard personnel with the haul. Telegraph picture

Chennai, Feb. 14: An Indian Coast Guard team caught a suspected LTTE suicide squad on a boat off Point Calimere and seized a huge cache of arms and ammunition last evening.

Coast guard ship Ramadevi was patrolling the Palk Bay when a fibre-glass boat caught the officials’ notice.

Among around 300 boats, its occupants seemed the only ones not busy fishing. A closer look revealed a registration number that did not tally with those given to Tamil Nadu fishermen.

The officials closed in on the boat and fired two rounds in the air before its occupants gave in.

The coast guard’s eastern regional commander, Rajendra Singh, today announced the “brilliant mid-sea operation” about 27 nautical miles off the Kodiyakarai coast, close to Point Calimere, 35 km south of Nagapattinam.

Among the arms seized was a seven-kg belt used by suicide bombers.

Tugged by Ramadevi, the 24-foot-long boat was brought to Chennai port and the five suspected suicide bombers — two Indian Tamils and three Sri Lankan Tamils — were handed over to Tamil Nadu police.

“We consider it a big cache,” Singh told reporters from the deck of Ramadevi while the handcuffed five were paraded before the media.

The suicide bombers’ belt was not meant for killing one person, but “for a much bigger explosion”, Singh said.

The accused — three of them in shorts and two in lungis — also carried a book titled BNF-37, which is a guide to making explosives.

The arms haul included an AK-56 rifle, 124 live rounds of ammunition, a sophisticated GPS (global positioning system) device and a satellite phone — the last two are commonly used by the LTTE.

It is, however, not known whether the five — Sagayam, Arumugam, A. Purushottaman, Ramachandran and Sivapadmanabhan — were headed to India or Sri Lanka. “That is really for the investigating agencies to find out,” Singh said.

Sources here said the suicide bomber’s belt signals “a specific mission on Indian soil”, particularly as the rebel Tiger, Karuna, is believed to be hiding in India.

The other possibility is the boat may have been “escorting” another arms-laden vessel, which escaped, to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.

The haul, which comes close on the heels of Indian Navy’s seizure of LTTE arms packed in gunny bags, has rocked political circles in Chennai. It also reinforces ADMK chief Jayalalithaa’s apprehensions that the state’s coastline has once again become porous for gun-running activities by the banned LTTE under the DMK regime.