claimed that he had posted armed guards outside, and asked the Army to increase the guard, to thwart a mass jail-break. Of such a plan there was not the slightest evidence, despite the Magistrate stretching the evidence past limits of credibility to maintain that there was one. Instead of answering the alarm and coming to the rescue, the Army, this time under Lt. Seneviratne, ran off elsewhere. The Lieutenant, according to the Chief Jailor’s uncontested testimony, went to put down an armed riot in the Remand Prison – one that was total fiction.

There is no evidence in the proceedings of that morning that the possibility of a mass escape was being considered seriously. Jansz’s call to Mervyn Wijesinghe, the discussion in his office, his subsequent discussion with the Security Council and his request to Brigadier Madawela to keep a squad ready for emergency action, had all to do with the security and transfer of Tamil PTA detainees. In running off elsewhere, Lt. Seneviratne showed no inkling of anticipating a mass escape from Welikade prison.

Looking back now, there is a slight ambiguity in the Chief Jailor’s claim:- viz. “Up to this point to the best of my knowledge there were no officers superior to me in office in the compound. As the most superior officer available at that time… I had in that situation to make decisions…” Could it be that the SP and ASPs were not present in the prison ‘compound’ at the time of the second attack?

Through well-wishers we made parallel queries from Saravanaperumal Yogarajah, a survivor, whose testimony was quoted in the last chapter, and Danny Munaweera, who was then ASP. Yogarajah had referred to the SP inquiring after him while he lay injured after the second attack. We wished to know if he had erroneously referred to the Chief Jailor as SP – the distinction was clear at that time since the former wore uniform while the SP and ASPs wore plain clothes. Yogarajah identified his interlocutor as ASP Danny Munaweera. Danny Munaweera, when asked, said that he had been there and recalled that SP Leo de Silva too was present and had gone into the YOB to see the injured. There was yet a possibility that they were out of the ‘compound’ at the time the violence started, if Janz had summoned them. Even then they would have heard the alarm and come rushing in, since Jansz’s office adjoins the prison, from where Jansz had himself come rushing in as soon as the alarm was raised on the 25th. There would have been no call on the Chief Jailor to ‘make decisions’. Jansz does not think that he would have summoned Leo de Silva, as the violence began soon after he arrived from Army HQ, giving him just enough time to phone for the emergency squad and rush over to the prison.

It is clear that Leo de Silva and the ASPs were there and would have been immediately alerted about the attack. Why Chief Jailor Karunaratne dubiously admitted to being in charge and took upon himself the task of telling the inquest untenable stories remains to be explained. Only one solution suggests itself.

There was a state of open insubordination in the prison. From the attack on the injured prisoners by members of the prison staff on the 25th which they were privy to, Munaweera and Amarasinghe knew the source of that insubordination. Leo de Silva, we may infer, took up the position that if he were to testify at the inquest, he would not cover up something so glaringly scandalous and compromise himself.

This is also suggested by what happened some years later when the Civil Rights Movement started legal proceedings on behalf of some of the victims. Both Jansz and Leo de Silva, by then retired, took up the position that they would tell the truth in open court. The State settled out court, to avoid a hearing.

The inquest has clearly recorded claims that do not stand up to scrutiny and has tried hard to pretend that the SP and ASPs did not exist. Some crucial testimony from Yogarajah appearing in Amudhu failed to appear in the inquest report. The Magistrate was at pains to record that Yogarajah did not ‘know’ any of the attackers rather than the fact that he had ‘identified’ Sepala Ekanayake as being among them. It was a rigged inquest and required three different parties to play the game – the Magistrate, the AG’s men and the Police who were ordered to conduct investigations and report to him.

If we accept that there was no riot, but that the second attack in particular, was executed by some members of the prison staff, we could dismiss most of the testimony at the inquest as fiction. Some of it is obviously so as we have pointed out. We also need to be very sceptical about the escape of the dangerous criminals from A3, who had readily armed themselves. The inquest itself comes out mainly as a staged affair.