Sri Lanka journalist murder investigation blocked
Raisa Wickrematunge 31 January 2025 Genocide Watch
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Lasantha Wickrematunge’s gravesite during a memorial service on 8 January 2025. Sixteen years since the
Sri Lankan editor’s murder, there has been little progress in the investigation in the case. |
The delays, denials and obfuscations in the investigation into the Sri Lankan editor’s murder reveals continued impunity around the killing of journalists in Sri Lanka
ON THE MORNING of 8 January 2009, Lasantha Wickrematunge, my uncle and the editor of the Sunday Leader, was on his way to work when he noticed black-clad men on motorcycles following him. He had cause to be alarmed, having received death threats – including one just weeks before, scrawled in red ink, which warned, “If you write, you will be killed.” Wickrematunge made several calls, including to family and friends, but ultimately decided to continue the drive to the office of his weekly newspaper.
As a family, we have mentally retraced that journey many times, wondering if there was something he could have done that would have prevented what happened next. Around the corner from the newspaper’s office, on Templars Road in the Colombo suburb of Mount Lavinia, the motorcyclists forced Lasantha’s vehicle off the road near a primary school. One of them delivered what would prove to be a fatal wound. Onlookers rushed Lasantha to Colombo South Teaching Hospital, but it was too late.
In the aftermath of my uncle’s murder, one image was transmitted over and over again on television news channels – that of his car with a single, perfectly round hole in the wind screen, a spiderweb of cracks surrounding it. When a judicial medical officer wrote that Lasantha had been killed with a firearm, no one questioned it, even though there were no shell casings found at the crime scene, nor any bullets, and notes from the emergency surgeon who tended to him said that his wounds had not been caused by bullets.
From the beginning, the investigation by the Sri Lankan government, then headed by Mahinda Rajapaksa, was flawed and beset by delays. Lasantha travelled everywhere with phone firmly clamped to ear and a notebook that contained jottings from interviews, often detailing corruption at the highest levels. It was soon discovered that both his notebook and phone had disappeared. Later, it was found that his phone had been stolen. What happened to the notebook was more mysterious, particularly as the police had collected it from the crime scene. The officer-in-charge of crimes at the Mount Lavinia police, Tissa Sugathapala, made a two-page log entry about the contents of the notebook, which included two vehicle license-plate numbers scrawled on the front and back pages. Sugathapala then handed the notebook over to the deputy inspector general Prasanna Nanayakkara, who said he would hand it over to the inspector general of police. After that, the notebook disappeared.
Early on, questions were raised as to what Lasantha’s notebook might have contained. My uncle was best known for his exposés, which went all the way back to the 1980s, when he penned a column for the Sunday Times under the nom-de-plume Suranimala while working as a secretary for the former prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. Among his scoops as Suranimala was one about Ranasinghe Premadasa’s proposals as president for the devolution of certain powers to provincial governments so as to resolve tensions between the Sinhalese and Tamils – detailed down to the different colours of ink used to write the proposals. At the time, my uncle was a whistleblower. But soon, in his role at the Sunday Leader, he would display a talent for digging up uncomfortable truths through investigative reporting.
Part of this was down to his charm. He would greet everyone with a smile and a joke. His cheery voice would precede him when he visited our house, where he would stop first in the kitchen and poke his fingers into whatever was bubbling on the stove before making his way around the building to chat to each of us. As a shy child, I usually had my nose in a book, but my uncle would always find a way to draw me into conversation in a way that was never condescending.
Lasantha cultivated a wide array of contacts on both sides of the political aisle, giving him access to inside information that few other journalists could match. While he was fun-loving, he was also committed to his work, regularly appearing at the office with a sheaf of mysterious papers that would later form the backbone of his latest exposé, and frequently disappearing into his office to frantically type up his weekly column.
Around the time Lasantha was killed, he had been reporting on a deal between the Sri Lankan Air Force and Ukrinmash, a Ukrainian state-owned arms firm. The deal involved the procurement of bombers manufactured by the Russian Aircraft Corporation, commonly known as MiG, to the tune of over USD 14 million. As Lasantha reported, the price was suspiciously high – twice the price paid for similar aircraft in 2000 – and the procurement was billed as a government-to-government deal, bypassing a tender process. In a series of articles, Lasantha unveiled how the deal was brokered by Udayanga Weeratunga, a cousin to the ruling Rajapaksa family. He showed that a Singaporean middleman had paid Ukrinmash just USD 7 million, with at least some of the remaining money wired to Rajapaksa relatives to Weeratunga – seeming evidence of kickbacks.
In November 2007, armed men stormed the Sunday Leader office, held the staff at gunpoint and set the paper’s printing press on fire. No one was ever charged for the attack. In February 2008, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, then the secretary of defence, filed a defamation case against the Sunday Leader over the MiG stories. The case was ongoing when Lasantha was killed.
Lasantha was reporting in a fraught climate for journalists. In 2009, Sri Lankan media outlets faced increased restrictions, particularly when reporting on the country’s civil war. Journalists faced both verbal and physical attacks. Keith Noyahr, the deputy editor of The Nation, was abducted and beaten in 2008; Paranirupasingham Devakumar, the Jaffna correspondent for NewsFirst, was stabbed to death after his critical reporting on the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam; and the freelance defence writer Namal Perera was assaulted. Days before Lasantha’s death, an armed group set fire to the office of the channel MTV-MBC, with the Sri Lankan government describing the attack as “an inside job”. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 16 journalists had been killed in pursuit of their work over the course of the civil war up to January 2009, either murdered, caught in the crossfire, or while pursuing dangerous assignments.
The motive for Lasantha’s killing was almost certainly to silence him. The grieving Sunday Leader editorial team went straight to the office and pushed out the new issue. That weekend, the newspaper’s readers opened the editorial section to see a column titled “And then they came for me”. It began, “No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces, and in Sri Lanka, journalism.” The blistering editorial would be reprinted all around the world, keeping interest in Lasantha’s case alive.
A portrait of Lasantha that hangs in our family living room. Lasantha was reporting in a fraught climate for journalists. In 2009, Sri Lankan media outlets faced increased restrictions, particularly when reporting on the country’s civil war.
FOR NEARLY A YEAR after the killing, until my family petitioned to have the investigation handed over to the Criminal Investigations Department (CID), there was no progress in the case. By December 2009, a court granted that request.
The CID made several key breakthroughs. One of them was the identification of a specific group of military intelligence officers, known as the Tripoli Platoon, who were implicated in the killing. This discovery came thanks to eyewitness testimony, and the eventual tracing of cell phones linked to five SIM cards believed to have been used by those who had followed Lasantha that day. The CID also found that members of the same platoon were linked to attacks on other journalists, including Noyahr and Upali Tennakoon.
Just as this discovery was made, in 2010, the inspector general of police ordered the CID to transfer the case to the Terrorism Investigation Department (TID). Around the same time, the commanding officer of the Tripoli Platoon was given a diplomatic post at the Sri Lankan embassy in Thailand.
In February that year, the TID arrested 17 military officers suspected of involvement in Lasantha’s killing. All 17 were eventually released without charges. A member of the Tripoli Platoon was detained by the TID for questioning, but was later released after an eyewitness who had pinpointed him died while in police custody. While in detention, the Tripoli Platoon member was promoted, paid his salary and allowed to apply for loans.
In June 2010, the journalist Stephen Sackur interviewed Gotabaya on his BBC show, HardTalk. In one clip, now infamous, Sackur questions him about Lasantha’s case. Gotabaya grows visibly angry at the mention of my uncle’s name and splutters, “Who is Lasantha Wickrematunge? He is just another person. There are so many murders everywhere, in the whole world there are murders. Why are you asking about Lasantha?”
There was little more progress until 2015, when the Rajapaksas were defeated at the polls and a new government, headed by Maithripala Sirisena, was voted into power. One of its key campaign promises had been moving forward the investigation.
In July 2016, an intelligence officer named Premananda Udalagama was taken into detention in connection with the case and charged with abduction of an eyewitness, assault and conspiracy. That September, one year into the new government, a second autopsy of Lasantha was ordered due to discrepancies in the original medical and post-mortem examination reports.
The process of the exhumation was extremely painful for our family. Ahimsa Wickrematunge, my cousin and Lasantha’s daughter, pleaded for privacy, but journalists gathered outside the cemetery on the day of the exhumation and jostled to get photos of the grave. One journalist went so far as to fly a drone over the open grave in order to get a photo of my uncle’s remains. As a member of the family, I was asked if I wanted to be present to witness the exhumation. I declined: I wanted to preserve my memory of my uncle as he was.
In October, a retired intelligence officer was found dead in his home after apparently taking his own life. A note in his pocket contained a confession that he had killed Lasantha and a claim that Udalagama was innocent. His death was treated as suspicious, and his body was exhumed a week after his death for further investigation.
The police arrested five intelligence officers in 2017 in connection with Lasantha’s case. They also indicted investigators for concealing information on the case. It was revealed that the deputy inspector general of police at the time had issued instructions that the pages containing the license-plate numbers of the motorcycles that followed Lasantha to be removed from his notebook. It was also around this time that details on the tracking of the cell phones used by the men who had followed Lasantha, and the links with the Tripoli Platoon, were first publicly reported.
In 2018, media reports revealed that an anonymous tip-off soon after Lasantha’s death had led the CID to a motorcycle said to have been used in the murder and then dumped in a marsh. The CID’s investigations traced the motorcycle to two Tamil youths who had disappeared – seemingly after being abducted, according to eyewitness testimony. Their bodies were later discovered in Anuradhapura, some 200 kilometres from Colombo, and identified through DNA tests. A former senior superintendent of police testified in court in March 2018 that their killings had been part of an attempt to attribute Lasantha’s murder to the LTTE.
In January 2019, the magistrate’s court at Mount Lavinia ordered the channel Derana TV to hand over to the CID unedited footage of an interview it had conducted with Gotabaya in 2007, more than a year before Lasantha was killed. In the interview, Gotabaya refers to journalists writing “filth” about him and then driving around alone in their cars – believed to be a reference to Lasantha. That April, Ahimsa, Lasantha’s daughter, filed a lawsuit against Gotabaya, accusing him of playing a role in her father’s death.
By November, Gotabaya had been elected the country’s president, voted in by a public looking for reassurance after the Easter Sunday bombings earlier that year. Since, as the head of state, he now had immunity from prosecution, my cousin was forced to withdraw her suit.
Gotabaya’s presidency saw the case again stalled, with judicial hearings delayed. Within days of the 2019 election, the director of the CID, Shani Abeysekara, was demoted and transferred to serve as personal assistant to the deputy inspector general of the Southern Province. The CID officer Nishantha Silva later fled the country for fear of retribution for his role in the case. His departure was met with much controversy, with rumours swirling as to where he had fled and with whose help. In 2020, the CID arrested Abeysekara for allegedly concealing evidence in another case. He was detained for over ten months before being released.
Posters of killings, abduction and torture of journalists, lined the front of the Presidential secretariat during the 2022 protests around Sri Lanka’s economic crisis, highlighting continued impunity in their cases. Wickrematunge’s face was displayed alongside that of Dharmaratnam Sivaram, Poddala Jayantha and others
ULTIMATELY, GOTABAYA’S PRESIDENCY was cut short. In 2022, Sri Lanka was plunged into crisis due to the Rajapakas’ economic mismanagement, including sweeping tariff cuts that Gotabaya had introduced as president.. Angry citizens took to the streets and the Galle Face Green in Colombo, near the presidential secretariat, became one of the main protest sites.
Early on in the protests, I saw a photo of a protester holding up a banner bearing my uncle’s face. “Who is Lasantha? Look around. He is everywhere,” the banner said. It was a powerful reminder that it was not just his family, his former colleagues at the Sunday Leader and other journalists who remembered him.
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Screenshot of a post on X (formerly Twitter) showing a protester holding a
poster saying 'Who is Lasantha? Look around. He is everywhere' referencing
an interview with Stephen Sackur from 2010 on BBC HardTalk. @Thedmdvbd |
Over the next few months, my uncle’s name and face would appear again at the Galle Face Green protest site. A string of posters showing killed journalists adorned the fence in front of the presidential secretariat, and a similar memorial was set up in front of the nearby Shangri-La hotel. At the peak of the protests, the names of Sri Lankan journalists killed in the pursuit of their work were projected directly onto the presidential secretariat. I saw my uncle’s name alongside the names of many others, along with a call for justice – a call met with cheers from watching protesters. ________________________
Time will tell whether Dissanayake will move on my uncle’s case. And it must be said that there are also other cases that deserve attention but have languished unresolved – the cases of Aiyathurai Nadesan, Dharmaratnam Sivaram, Mylvaganam Nimalarajan, Prageeth Eknaligoda, and Isaipriya, among many others
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Seeing so many people remember not just my uncle but also many others unjustly killed, including Tamil journalists, moved me deeply. Around that time, at an annual vigil held in my uncle’s memory, I had begun calling attention to the continued impunity around the killing of journalists in Sri Lanka. I often felt that I was speaking into an uncaring camera lens to be fodder for the evening’s primetime news, or writing into a void repeating the same names year after year, but it seemed that people had been listening.
The protests finally forced Gotabaya out and he was replaced as president by Ranil Wickremesinghe. In 2019, when Wickremesinghe was the prime minister under the Sirisena government, my cousin had written a letter to point out that he often invoked my uncle’s name in his rhetoric but showed no interest in seeing the investigation into his murder through. While there had been incremental progress in the investigation during Sirisena’s regime, which revealed cover-ups by the police and military intelligence, there was scant investigation into who had given the orders to the officers of the Tripoli Platoon. Now, as Sri Lanka scrambled to find its feet after the economic crisis, “emblematic” cases, including my uncle’s, were shunted aside by the Wickremesinghe administration.
In May 2022, Lasantha’s case was taken up by the People’s Tribunal on the Murder of Journalists, a joint initiative by the international groups Free Press Unlimited, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Without Borders, alongside cases from Mexico and Syria. In September, the tribunal found the Sri Lankan state guilty of “grave violations” in the case. I watched as several people came forward to testify about the media landscape in Sri Lanka and the threats that the Sunday Leader had faced, including the burning of its press and the frequent death threats to its journalists. It was cathartic to hear the judgment, even if the People’s Tribunal has no authority to hold the Sri Lankan state to account and the government did not respond.
The call of the protesters in 2022 was for “system change”. Last year, Sri Lanka voted in a new government, headed by the National People’s Power (NPP), hoping for an end to the corruption, nepotism and violence embedded in our political culture. The new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, has promised to pursue investigations in several key cases, including my uncle’s. But his government has also already begun backtracking on key campaign promises. For instance, the NPP now says that the Prevention of Terrorism Act, used in the past to silence journalists, will not be repealed as it promised but rather replaced with other legislation to curb extremism.
Time will tell whether Dissanayake will move on my uncle’s case. And it must be said that there are also other cases that deserve attention but have languished unresolved – the cases of Aiyathurai Nadesan, Dharmaratnam Sivaram, Mylvaganam Nimalarajan, Prageeth Eknaligoda, and Isaipriya, among many others.
The Committee to Protect Journalists lists 19 Sri Lankan journalists among its list of those killed in the pursuit of their work across the world. The Journalists for Democracy database, which records killings of journalists and media workers, has recorded 43 names from Sri Lanka. Today, we are barely any closer to justice and accountability for their deaths.
In the 16 years since my uncle’s death, I have seen the crowds gathering at his grave every January grow and shrink, and seen politicians arrive and depart, bowing and offering platitudes to waiting cameras. In truth, there has been little movement towards uncovering real answers. My uncle’s case alone shows a concerted effort to delay, deny and obfuscate when it comes to seeking justice for the killing of journalists in Sri Lanka. What little progress there has been has come only when there is a change in power, and when rival politicians see opportunity for gain. Along the way, there have also been many deaths of key witnesses in the case, with even members of military intelligence or the CID under threat. I believe, sadly, that the system of political patronage that has enabled so much corruption and covered up so much past violence in Sri Lanka remains very much alive. I risk disappointment to hope that the current president, Dissanayake, will prove me wrong.
© Himal Southasian 2024
