National Television of Tamil Eelam (NTT) was a television channel affiliated to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a separatist militant organization which aimed to create the independent state of Tamil Eelam in northern Sri Lanka.
The Tigers had previously operated a small television station in Jaffna in the mid-1980s, which did not last long. [1] The studios were destroyed on 14 February 1987 by the Indian army. [2]
NTT started broadcasting on 26 March 2005 from an undisclosed location within Tamil Eelam. It started with a daily 15-minute news bulletin, which was sent to the Tamil Television Network, an LTTE-affiliated television station based in Paris. The programming produced by NTT was still not available in Asia, that depended on the introduction of a channel to an available satellite. This made NTT the first television channel owned by a rebel insurgent group. [1] Satellite broadcasts to Asia started on 8 August, [3] Effective 25 November, its daily airtime increased to 90 minutes, from 7:30pm Tamil Eelam Time for Asia and from 8:30pm to 10pm GMT for Europe on TTN. [4]
In early April 2007, Intelsat removed NTT from its satellites covering Europe and Asia, citing unauthorized use on the grounds that the LTTE was a terrorist organization. [5] Its associate channel TTN was shut down on 3 May 2007. [6]
The channel reportedly shut down in 2009 due to the end of the Sri Lankan civil war.
The logo of the channel was the Gloriosa superba , known among Tamils as the Karthigaipoo. [7]