14 October, 2024

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What They Did To My Father And Why They Did It

By Ahimsa Wickrematunge

I first came to know of the MiG Deal in August 2007. I was living in Canada with family when my father called me from Colombo. He told me that The Sunday Leader had reported on a shady military contract involving Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the air force. My father had just watched a television interview in which Rajapaksa had denied having any involvement in this “MiG deal”. My father rambled on with details about tender procedure, inter-governmental contracts and credit letters, all of which flew well over my innocent little sixteen-year-old head, as I tried without success to move our conversation towards a more father-daughter wavelength. His eye was on the prize, however. All he could talk about was the follow up article he was planning.

A few days later, on Sunday, 2nd September 2007, I logged on to the Sunday Leader website, as I often did, to see my father’s banner headline that the “MiG deal crash lands on defence ministry”. According to this reporting, the “MiG Deal” in which Gotabaya Rajapaksa had claimed to be uninvolved in on television, was orchestrated by his cousin, Udayanga Weeratunga, and began with a meeting between Rajapaksa, Weeratunga, the air force commander and one of the Ukrainian masterminds of the deal.

That meeting with Rajapaksa, the Leader reported, took place on the 6th of February. It was only the next day, they said, that the air force suddenly developed a longing for MiGs and the air force commander wrote a letter to the Ukrainian conspirator to ask for a proposal. I have seen this letter from the air force commander Donald Perera to Ukrainian national Dimitri Peregudov, dated 7th February 2006. It was not even written on a letterhead. Typed in the same ‘Comic Sans MS’ scribble font with which kindergarten teachers printed posters for infants, it was little more than a childish coverup.

This letter was supposed to belatedly transform the ‘unsolicited’ proposal that his boss’ cousin had shoved down the throat of the air force commander the previous day in the defence secretary’s office into a ‘solicited’ one, so it could be considered under procurement rules. As far as I know, no one has to date asked Donald Perera why he suddenly asked for a proposal for MiGs, having written to the defence secretary barely two weeks prior that the air force needed to consider a broad number of options, not just MiGs, in choosing its new bomber aircraft.

My father’s reporting poked several more holes in the legitimacy of the MiG deal, from the circumvention of several standard procurement procedures, to exposing the ghost company through which the profits had been laundered, to shining a spotlight on the meddling of Udayanga Weeratunga, at every stage of the transaction.

The following month, on 18th October 2007, a lawyer for Gotabaya Rajapaksa wrote to my father threatening to sue him for defamation for causing Rs. 1 billion rupees in damage to his character. I can’t imagine that there is any way that poor Gotabaya Rajapaksa could have realised at that time that he was walking into a carefully baited trap set by the wily editor of The Sunday Leader. In Rajapaksa’s letter of demand, he said that thanks to my father’s intrepid reporting, his “role of defence secretary”, “had been adversely affected thus creating adverse consequences to the war against terror in the battlefield.”

My father responded bluntly that if that were so, Rajapaksa “should forthwith resign from the post of defence secretary” in the interests of national security. My father threatened to counter-sue Rajapaksa for Rs. 2 billion if he were sued, on the grounds that he “has always remained in this country and worked for its betterment,” while Rajapaksa “has voluntarily left this country and migrated to the United States of America and taken citizenship in that country by swearing allegiance to that country.”

Throughout his career, my father was the maestro of litigation and a decorated veteran of wars of words. What he soon found himself in was a war of a more sinister sort. A couple of weeks after the snarky reply to Rajapaksa’s letter of demand, on 21st November 2007, black-clad commandos stormed the offices of the Sunday Leader, held the security staff at gunpoint with assault rifles, and set the printing presses ablaze. It will come as a surprise to none that not a soul was ever investigated, arrested or prosecuted by the police for this pathetic act of cowardice.

Three months later, my father got the war he was waiting for. On 22nd February 2008, Gotabaya Rajapaksa filed a lawsuit for defamation against my father and The Sunday Leader, charging that the allegations made by my father against Rajapaksa were false, malicious and defamatory. By then, I was living with my father at our home on Kandewatte Terrace in Nugegoda. I was flummoxed at how he was bouncing around the house, grinning from ear-to-ear in response to the news that he had been sued, almost as if he had slept with a shirt hanger in his mouth.

I looked at him more quizzically than lovingly in search of an explanation. Once he had finished whatever important phone call he was on, he finally turned his gaze to me and beamed. My memory of our exchange is no-doubt tainted by over a decade of agony, but this is what I remember.

 “You see…” I think he started, hanging on the word “see” in a telltale signal that a sermon was to follow. “When someone sues you, they have to take the stand and be cross-examined. In any normal lawsuit, you can only ask them about things that are directly relevant to the actual case,” he explained.

 “Defamation is different. If someone sues you for defamation of character, you can ask them under oath about absolutely any aspect of their life,” he went on. “If he says his reputation is worth so much that I have done Rs. 1 billion in damages, I can defend by showing that what we wrote is true and in the public interest, which is correct. But we can also have some fun.” With all my father’s notoriety for journalism, it was easily to forget, except in moments like these, that he was a lawyer at heart, and a card-carrying member of the Bar Association.

 To borrow a phrase from The Sunday Leader, “in a nutshell”, my father said he would adopt a legal strategy of proving to the court that Rajapaksa’s reputation was worth no more than ten rupees, as opposed to one billion rupees. This he would do, he said, by exposing every skeleton in the defence secretary’s closet, by personally questioning him in a public courtroom under penalty of perjury. The proceedings, he proudly planned to publish in his newspaper to show the country who Gotabaya Rajapaksa really was. After explaining his plan, he left me with a life tip: “never, ever sue anyone for defamation,” he warned.

 His giddiness lasted for some months as his newspaper continued to expose scandal after scandal and put the government on the backfoot. “We have them on the run,” he would thunder as he scurried in and out of the house. Of course, we all took these boasts with a pinch of salt, because, as far as my father was concerned, he had any given government “on the run” at any given moment.

 His mood darkened sharply in late May 2008, after the abduction and torture of  fellow journalist Keith Noyahr, who had himself been critical of the defence establishment. There was something strange about this incident. It had my father more worried than even the arson attack on his press. His beaming and constant optimism waned. In the following days I heard him whispering to people over the phone, suggesting that they leave the country for their safety.

 From what I know of his relationship with Mahinda Rajapaksa, which he rarely spoke of in detail outside of his innermost circle, it became clear to me that he was getting closer to the president after the Keith Noyahr incident than he had been previously. He took a lot more precautions when speaking to the President and meeting him, which, in hindsight, I believe was part of an effort by both my father and President Rajapaksa to hide their interactions from the intelligence services. I don’t have the first clue as to what the two of them discussed, but my father told me that Mahinda felt insecure and leaned on their decades-long friendship for some sort of solace.

 By December of 2008, when the district court issued an order preventing my father from writing about Gotabaya Rajapaksa, he had become a lot more fatalistic. I would ask him sometimes, like when we were curled up on his couch upstairs watching a movie, whether he was still excited about questioning Gotabaya Rajapaksa in court. He would be evasive, and on one occasion confessed to me cryptically that he didn’t think they would ever let him get that far. When I asked him what he meant, he hugged me, kissed me and reminded me that if anything were to happen to him, he had left a letter with instructions, and some money, in one of his jacket pockets in his wardrobe.

 I couldn’t breathe. I don’t remember if that was because I was frightened by what he said or because he was squeezing me too tightly for me to get air into my lungs. It was difficult to be scared or frightened around my father. He had an air of omnipresence and immortality about him. Politicians of all parties always joked that he seemed to be everywhere and know everything. His colleagues and friends would say that he was bulletproof and untouchable. It was the following month, on the 8th of January 2009, that my father was proved right, and we were proved wrong. He woke up that morning shortly before dawn.

My father started his morning as always getting ready with one hand while talking on his cell phone with the other. He would interrupt his calls only to do his morning push-ups before taking a shower. He seemed not to have realised that he could put his calls on loudspeaker and leave the phone on the ground as he huffed and puffed through his thirty repetitions, which looked more like belly flops than push-ups.

After he had gotten dressed, we sat downstairs at the breakfast table, and he wolfed down his food before I walked him to his car and he kissed me on the forehead and drove off just like on any other day, at around 8:15 AM.

 I gave our resident driver, Dias, some money to buy me a snack. He asked me to call my father and confess on his behalf that he had left his cellphone in my father’s car, which I did, shielding Dias from my father’s annoyance. A few hours later, I came back downstairs and asked our nanny Manika whether Dias had come back with my food. She ignored my question and avoided eye contact. Puzzled, but unphased, I called Dias and asked him where he was. “I’m at the hospital,” he shrieked.

As my heart clenched and by blood turned to ice in my veins one excruciating inch at a time, Manika turned on the television. A news anchor was saying that my father had been attacked – or shot, I don’t remember. I only remember putting two and two together. Dias being at the hospital. Manika’s strange behavior. And a stone-faced news anchor saying my father’s name into the camera.

I ran upstairs to my father’s room, reached for the phone and started calling family. My aunt said it must be a false alarm. I called my mother, who lived with my brothers in Melbourne, and told her something was wrong, and that they should rush to Colombo. I waited for my father in his room. He had been attacked, after all, and would want to change into a fresh shirt before going on television and denouncing violence against the media, like he had two days before when Sirasa had been stormed and bombed by yet another platoon of black-clad commandos.

But my father never arrived. It was only when my cousin Raisa arrived, her eyes watering as she sat with me in my dad’s room, that my mind even tried to come to terms with reality. It failed. I shut down and locked myself in my father’s room with Raisa. I don’t remember much more about the eighth of January, except a sea of tear-strained faces and a chorus of voices repeating “I am sorry for your loss.”

The next several years of my life were defined by emptiness, suffering and helplessness. I moved back to Melbourne, to join my mother and brothers. But I was rudderless. I was lonely. There is a void in the life of an adolescent girl that can only be filled by a father’s love and warmth. I spent the better part of a decade doing little other than feeling wretched over the fact that I would never again get to hug or speak to my father. After spending what felt like a lifetime living and breathing my father’s day-to-day adventures by his side, I suddenly had to live without him. So far away from his orbit in Melbourne, I felt orphaned from his legacy and his cause.

It was almost eight years later, when I met CID detectives Nishantha Silva and Sisira Tissera in December 2016, that I fully understood the lengths to which the forces of evil had gone in covering up my father’s murder. The dedication and determination of these CID officers was the wind at my back and gave me the courage after so many years to dedicate my life to seeking justice for my father. For the first time since January 2009, I was inspired by men who were willing to risk their lives for justice. I felt I had found my place standing by their side.

My father was a journalist to his last breath. His last pen strokes, the CID says, came moments before his death, when he wrote down on his notebook the license plate numbers of two motorcycles, which are believed to have been those of his attackers. That notebook has vanished without a trace. In mid-January 2009, journalist Nirmala Kannangara from The Sunday Leader visited Deputy Inspector General Prasanna Nanayakkara, who was supervising my father’s murder investigation. She asked him about the notebook that she had seen with her own eyes at the crime scene. He swore to her that she was mistaken and that there was no notebook.

According to several police officers, two of whom made confessions to the Mount Lavinia Magistrate, my father’s notebook was pilfered from the evidence collection by Nanayakkara himself, who also ordered the destruction of all evidence of its existence. Nanayakkara has been arrested by the CID but he has remained mum about who ordered him to destroy this evidence or why.

Meanwhile, in late January 2009, at the Kalubowila Hospital, the Judicial Medical Officer charged with my father’s post-mortem, Dr. K. Sunil Kumara, was putting the finishing touches on a report that falsely claimed that my father was killed by gunfire. That conclusion the good doctor reached despite the absence of any bullets, entry or exit wounds, gunshot residue or shell casings anywhere near the crime scene. To prove this medical report a fiction, the CID had to exhume my father’s body and have three medical experts conduct a fresh post-mortem. They concluded unanimously that there were no grounds to suspect the use of firearms, and that my father was killed with a sharp instrument.

We don’t know why Dr. Sunil Kumara, a forensic medicine expert with decades of experience under his belt, erred in his evaluation. We do know, however, thanks to the CID, that he is a close relation of arrested DIG Nanayakkara, and that the two were in close contact while the false medical report was being prepared.

It was around this same time that the oft sullen and solemn Gotabaya Rajapaksa gave a beaming television interview to the BBC, clearly thrilled to bits by my father’s demise. “Who is Lasantha Wickrematunge?” he infamously quipped. “Just another murder,” he answered his own question. “I’m not concerned about that,” declared the permanent secretary of the ministry in charge of the police, who were ostensibly investigating my father’s cold-blooded murder.

Some months after I had left Sri Lanka, I was speaking to our driver Dias on the phone from Melbourne, and he asked me who I thought had killed my father. Based purely on Dad’s own predictions and the BBC interview, I told him it must have been Gotabaya Rajapaksa.Dias, while drowning his sorrows at a tavern, had repeated publicly that Lasantha Wickrematunge was killed by Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Shortly thereafter, he was abducted, hooded, bundled into a white van, taken to a safe house and threatened with certain death should he ever speak of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s involvement again. The terrified Dias fled Colombo thereafter. It was only in 2016 that the CID helped him to identify his abductor. The kidnapper turned out to be a senior military intelligence officer named Udalagama, who oversaw security for Rajapaksa’s head of national intelligence at the defence ministry. Dias picked him out of an identification parade. Dias has lived in hiding ever since, with no support from the government to this day.

In December of 2009 the CID took over the investigation into my father’s murder for the first time. They didn’t take long. In less than a month, they made a breakthrough. They identified the mobile phones used by my father’s assailants and connected these five phones to the national identity card (NIC) of a poor mechanic in Nuwara Eliya named Pitchai Jesudasan. When the CID questioned Jesudasan about these phones that had been bought with this NIC in November and December of 2008, the terrified mechanic pointed out that his NIC had been stolen six months prior by military intelligence officer Kannegedera Piyawansa. This interview took place on the morning of 18th January 2010.

It turns out the CID struck a nerve. That was the last they were to see of this investigation file, which was immediately yanked away from them and given to the Terrorist Investigation Division under mysterious circumstances. No one seems to know why. Meanwhile, according to a Sirasa News expose, on the afternoon of the same 18th January 2010, Gotabaya Rajapaksa ordered that a military officer serving in an embassy in Thailand be recalled immediately, and that a Major Prabath Bulathwatte be sent in his place. This Bulathwatte, as it turns out, was the commanding officer of the “Tripoli” military intelligence platoon whose officer Piyawansa was tied to the phones used in planning my father’s murder. For some reason, the defence secretary himself was in a mighty hurry to send this Major abroad, in violation of the presidential elections regulations that were in place with the polls barely a week away.

The rest of the cover up proceeded with military precision. Both Jesudasan and Piyawansa were arrested by the TID shortly after the presidential election in late January 2010. Poor Jesudasan died in custody under mysterious circumstances. Piyawansa fared a lot better. Army officers are not supposed to get paid while in remand custody. But Piyawansa made history as the first ever military officer to continue drawing a salary, and receive a promotion, plus over Rs. 1 million in loans from the army, all while he languished in remand custody. This accolade the army credited to an ‘administrative error’.

The government launched a propaganda campaign claiming that defeated presidential candidate Sarath Fonseka was responsible for killing my father. Perhaps that was so, in which case the Rajapaksa government was being awfully generous towards the former army commander by going to such great lengths to cover up the investigation, only to later jail him on much thinner charges through a kangaroo court.

The sad truth is that for all their dedication and hard work, most of these facts had been unearthed by the CID well before I first met the investigators in December 2016. Despite the Major Bulathwatte’s Tripoli platoon having been caught red handed not just in my father’s murder but also in the abduction and torture of Keith Noyahr, they remain at large, roaming free with their secret budget, weapons, white vans and motorcycles, and zero accountability. Over twenty military intelligence operatives have been arrested over abducting, killing or torturing a bevy of journalists, but neither the army nor the government has lifted a finger to draw back the iron curtain of impunity that has shielded these killer squads for over a decade.

Evidence is withheld from the CID on “national security” grounds, even as the military intelligence apparatus keeps the CID and those who assist it under constant surveillance and continues to try and cow them with scare tactics. As they drew closer to the truth in the two years since, the CID faced more and more bureaucratic hurdles and administrative roadblocks. Senior political leaders green and blue alike have been complicit in obstructing their investigations and providing more aid and comfort to the suspects than the detectives and witnesses. Some who risked their lives to become CID witnesses lost their jobs and been thrown out on the street. People often say that politicians control the CID. I have seen just the opposite. The CID has charged bravely ahead, incurring the wrath of politicians of all stripes as they dance on the thin ice between their patriotism and the termination of their careers.

“Be that as it may,” my father would say, the silver lining of this obsidian cloud is that it becomes clearer by the day that covering up the truth of the “MiG Deal” was literally worth a killing. The FCID investigation has proved every word my father exposed about that scandal. It has gone further. The Ukrainian government told FCID that they had nothing to do with it, and the FCID have proven that over US $7 million was stolen and laundered through shell companies in myriad tax havens. Interpol is hot on the heels of Udayanga Weeratunga.

Even as politicians have labored to stifle the CID investigation into my father’s murder, the FCID investigation into the MiG deal has proven beyond doubt that my father was on to something when I spoke to him from Canada in August 2007. I tracked down the interview that he was referring to on that call. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, clad in a crisp pink shirt and a subdued tie, talked about the MiG deal to Derana TV at 9:30Pm  on 19th August 2007, on their “360” program with interviewer Dilka Samanmali. My Sinhala is beyond atrocious, so I needed help with translating what I heard.

After a 30-minute party-line sermon about how proper the MiG deal was, how no third parties were involved and how he had nothing to do with it, and of course, after insisting that the articles about the scam were to support the LTTE and demoralize the armed forces, Gotabaya Rajapaksa shifted to the topic of media freedom. “They put my picture, and write filth,” he said. “If they can get away with that in this country, where else is there more freedom,” he went on.

“After writing these things, they can nicely drive their cars by themselves alone on the road and nothing happens to them,” he shamelessly boasted, raising and waving hands up and down in a mocking gesture of a driver holding a steering wheel. My father put this claim to the test ten years ago. He found out that this boast was no more accurate than Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s sincerest assertions about the legitimacy of his MiG deal. I know the former secretary is “not concerned about that.” I am.

Latest comments

  • 4
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    [edited out]

    Looks like Lasantha’s ghost is all over the Home page.

    • 10
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      Retarded ………..

      “[edited out]”
      Brilliant.
      Did you exorcise your imagined Ghost?

      “Looks like Lasantha’s ghost is all over the Home page.”

      If true you should be happy his ghost is not hounding you.

    • 12
      3

      Rtd. Lt. Reginald Shamal Perera ” …Looks like Lasantha’s ghost is all over the Home page…”

      absolutely it’s a sham…the ghost of 100’s of thousands of Tamil who were massacred by the ..same.. Gota ..10 years ago ….is forgotten..Perhaps the home page of CT is too small..

    • 3
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      most of the high profile military leaders were partially responsible for these kind of miserable killings and abductions during the war. Because the final responsibility lies with the person who executing erroneous orders. It was not in the battle front the real strategical decisions made however those who procure military arsenals from Generals to Private in the Army, Air Marshals to Recruit in the Air force and Admiral to Recruit in the Navy had their fight for perks and tried to loot something whilst doing procurement. The real battle was among them to enhance their profit or their portion. Anyway we have lost great Journalist, a man with great courage at young age. Definitely those who have done abductions and killings under cover with honorable military uniforms merely because of perks from high profile political leaders or rather say looters have to be punished. May be in a version of a Ghost.

    • 8
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      RETRIBUTION WILL COME .. to all those who were involved in this dastardly MURDER.

      If it does not come, then there is NO KARMA as preached by the Enlightened One.

      ONLY TIME WILL TELL….

      • 1
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        What is the use of retribution? It is not going to bring back the loved ones.

    • 1
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      Not that, Potty Rtd.(retarded?) Lt. her is a trivia question to cheer you up.

      Who said the words….“You pig that eats shit!!! You shit shit dirty f…..g journalist!!!”
      and to whom?

      Clue: it was a national ranaviru who loved puppy dogs (and pussies.)

  • 35
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    Ahimsa,

    Thanks for the detailed information. Let us keep the hope that your father’s killers will face justice soon, one way or another.

    • 11
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      Agnos

      Any idea why do the Asses at the centre allow/order their goons either in uniform or in civil to burn down established institutions like Uthayan news paper office, Sunday Leader, Jaffna Library, business establishments, …………………. ? You know I am not talking about arson for insurance purpose.

      The goons and their bosses are/were fascinated by fire/arson. Must be some defect in their genetic building block.

      • 1
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        The arson set by Hanuman in Ravana’s time is still continuing to burn in SL.

  • 32
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    You have written a very detailed report… Why do I, an avid reader of Sri Lankan papers have never before read about this much details? It’s an unimaginable loss for you and I cannot imagine what I would have done had I been in your shoes, BUT… you need to tell this story everywhere… why don;t you get on TV please? why don’t you have a Youtube interview please? The Sri Lankan populace needs to know these details!!! If you live away from SL and don’t much care for it, atleast do it for your dad… you do know there’s a real chance that the same goons can come to power?

  • 3
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    This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our Comment policy.For more detail see our Comment policy https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/comments-policy-2

  • 22
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    “but neither the army nor the government has lifted a finger to draw back the iron curtain of impunity that has shielded these killer squads for over a decade”. This sentence sums it all. Ahimsa’s heart wrenching story is also a well written and lucid exposure of how and why her father was murdered in cold blood. With our yo yo President’s present relationship with the Rajapakses we can only expect more “cover-ups”. As it will certainly be (and has been) with Thajudeen, Noyahr, Pradeep, et al. There is enough of a macabre story here for somebody to make a blockbuster film. “Defamation is different. If someone sues you for defamation of character, you can ask them under oath about absolutely any aspect of their life,” makes sense why all those letters of demand don’t ever reach the court registrar’s desk! Makes sense why Lasantha was murdered before he could do this..

  • 22
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    It is truly shameful that after ten years this case remains in limbo while the obvious MAIN SUSPECT remains at large. I colleague of mine related a story to me about our dear prime minister. He related this story to support his assertion that three people in Sir Lanka need to be put behind bars. They are as follows. Mahinda Rajapakshe, Sirisena, and Ranil. The first two are obvious criminals but why Ranil? During a Royal Thomian big match while the festivities were swinging into high gear a PM in high spirits who was in attendance was asked a question. What will you do to put the Rajapakshes behind bars? He replied I will appoint a commission to go into the charges first. He was then asked what will you do next. He replied I will appoint another commission thereafter to decide what to do next. It makes my blood boil to read this article. Obstructing justice my dear back boneless pusillanimous prime minister is just as great a crime as committing murder. 6.2 million people voted for you and your party and what have you done? Why cant this Nanayakara fellow be made to confess. Does the police not know how to extract info from this type of scoundrel? Why are witnesses treated so shoddily? The list of questions is endless. Mark my words if the UNP goes to another election without solving this and the other murder cases that have dragged on for years, you do not DESERVE THE PEOPLES VOTE.

    • 0
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      Right. UNP will lose, and then who will win? SLFP, of course. Excellent chance for the dynamic duo (MR + Gotta) to re-establish how innocent they are, and how the people also trust them enough to bring them back.

  • 17
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    Very much saddened.

  • 19
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    My heart felt condolence Ahimsa. I know for sure, I will not be able to end the cycle of ‘Samsara’ this time but taking every effort (‘Weeriya’) not to be born again among these ‘Wasalayas’ in Sri Lanka. Your dad somewhat fortunate to leave this hellhole and I am pretty sure, he is with the ‘sathpurisha’ clan. May you and your family be well & peaceful and most of all free from further sufferings. Metta.

  • 23
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    Wonderfully articulated. An excellent tribute to the father from daughter. I feel pretty sad and ashamed of myself for not raising my voice against the state sponsored murder of an unbiased journalist who cared Sri Lanka as much as I do. I’m so sorry dear dear Ahimsa.

  • 18
    2

    Absolutely horrendous. This single article if anything, is one reason why I won’t vote Gotabhya into power. I am truly sorry for the loss you faced. Here’s hoping you one day get to hug your father once more, on the other shore.

    • 4
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      ashan “This single article if anything, is one reason why I won’t vote Gotabhya into power….”

      you are a typical example of the current state of Sri Lanka .

      I was expecting a comment like this “….This single article if anything, is one of many reason why Gotabhya should not contest…..but should be behind the bars….

      There is all the evidence to put the Rajapakse family behind bars….

      instead what happens?

      he become fake PM the fake LoO and now ….not so fake LoO

      the entire political class of Sinhala Sri Lanka is in it together

  • 10
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    Do not expect anything from Ranil Samanala Wickramasinghe as he, himself involved in infamous Batalanda torture chambers in 88/90 period and also a very close associate of Gonawela Sunil.

    As far as my memory is concerned, although Lasantha Wickramatunga written some articles of investigative journalism on corruption, he was an ardent supporter of LTTE or its ideology, which is traitorous.

    • 6
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      Nimal Tissass Wijethungass

      “he was an ardent supporter of LTTE or its ideology, which is traitorous.”

      Please let us know what is/was LTTE ‘s ideology?

      • 5
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        Veddha,

        There’s an app called “google” on your stupid phone. Use it for god’s sake rather than acting like a clown in a public forum.

        • 3
          1

          Retarded ……… women smelling ….

          “Use it for god’s sake rather than acting like a clown in a public forum.”

          What for?
          I know you are a spit polishing bigoted retard who has been sitting on his brain since birth, …. I need no confirmation from google.

          • 1
            1

            Native Vedda:
            The Retarded One, caddy to rich and famous Ontarians, must be sitting on air because the cushion you mention does not exist.
            What Canada needs is a Gota to take care of its Retarded Ones, even though it might be a terrible thing to do: putting the mentally disabled out of their misery (and ours, the unfortunates who have to witness their witlessness)

        • 0
          4

          Rtd. Lt. Reginald Shamal Perera, thank you for your comments, which confirm my theory that Shingulays have monkey blood.

          • 0
            1

            Palani Supramaniam,

            We all have monkey blood Dumbo. Why because we are all descended from Monkeys in East Africa some 3 million years ago. And how stupid we all are to varying degrees.

            • 1
              0

              Good Student bad education

              “Why because we are all descended from Monkeys in East Africa some 3 million years ago. “

              How come your ancestors stopped evolving some 3 million years ago?
              Is it because you are taking your own time to evolve from a lion into monkey, and some 3 million after you will evolve into a human?

              Take your own time.
              We are not in a hurry.
              We can wait.

        • 0
          0

          Rtd. Lt. Reginald Shamal Perera – we all know you are so stupid that you have to google everything.
          Namal also passed his law exams by Google….now we know who advised him.
          Sri Lanka is run by Google politician.

      • 3
        6

        Native Veddah/Kala Veddah/Angoda Veddah,

        Hope that you are commenting from Angoda as your writing has all the hallmark of Resident patient of Angoda mental hospital.

        Go to hell and meet Terrorist Prabhakaran, the so called sun god and inquire hat is LTTE ideology.

        • 3
          1

          Nimal Tissass Wijethungass

          “he was an ardent supporter of LTTE or its ideology, which is traitorous.”

          Please let us know what is/was LTTE ‘s ideology?

          • 0
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            Kala vedda/Angoda vedda/ Native veddah,

            Go to hell and meet so called sun god prabhakaran and learn hat is his ideology.

            Do not come to these forums to ask question and if you do not know, learn and come to make some worthwhile comments rather than act like a Resident patient of mental hospital, Angoda.

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          Nimal,

          There is absolutely no value in any meaningful discussion with this deranged individual.

          Recently, he made the joke of 2019 when he said here that he is single handedly changing the habits of the entire Sinhala-Buddhist population of Sri Lanka. You can assess his idiotic mentality just by that statement.

          He’s a terrorist. He supports the total annihilation of the Sinhalese race. He he attempts to show rationality in his posts every once in a while. Just to fool the gullible.

          About a week ago, he threatened me with grave consequences when I made a statement about Robert Kaplan. I am still waiting for his empty threats to come to fruition.

          But make no mistake. Sri Lankan society have the correct medication for Mad Dogs. It will be administered in due course.

          • 4
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            Retarded …….

            “But make no mistake. Sri Lankan society have the correct medication for Mad Dogs. “

            Did the medication work for you?
            If it did please pass it on to others, starting with Tisass, Gota, Svendra, entire Mahindawamsa, Wimal windbag, Udhaya, … take more in case if you needed repeated prescription, ………………

            Time and again you prove you need a change in your life, you should convert back to Buddhism from your present faith in Sinhala/Buddhist Fascism.

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          Nimal Tissa Wijethunga:
          The level of your intelligence is most apparent by the fact that you, obviously, don’t know that there is a thing called “spell-check” on your computer and, if you do, don’t know how to use it.
          Sri Lanka is blessed with so many geniuses like you!

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        Fake Vedda the El Stupido,

        1.LTTE ideology is to kidnap 10,000+ Tamil kids on the way to school and brain wash them to become suicide bombers and the like.

        2. Tell Tamil women that LTTE stands for equality of women by women becoming “Freedom Birds” and blow them selves up. One of them blew Rajiv Gandhi to pieces 5/1991 Sri Perumpudur.

        3. Kill and decimate all the brilliantly educated Tamils such as Lakshman Kadirigama and Neelen Thiruchelvam.

        4. Engage in credit card racketeering from petrol stations in the West to finance the LTTE.

        5.Engage in drug smuggling from South America to the USA and Canada in one man submarines via Costa Rica, which pissed them off. (An LTTE Tamil was arrested about 2007 by the US Coast Guard off costa Rica).

        6. Engage in extortion of ones own fellow Tamils in Canada, USA, England, Switzerland, New Zealand, France and Germany (oh I almost forgot Norway, silly me) to fund the LTTE. 40% commission given to LTTE fundraisers.

        7. Extort money from Tamils in the West otherwise their relatives in Vanni will be killed.

        8. Killing all Tamil opponents EPRLF, PlOLTE, TELO, TULF leaders Amitralingam, Yoganathan (13/07/1989), Tammbimuttu and his wife in front of the Canadian High Commisssion in Colombo.

        9. Claiming to be “sole representative” of the Tamils when he was n’t.
        Lot of decent Tamils hate the LTTE.

        10. Holding 300,000 thousands of his fellow Tamils hostage and hiding behind their skirts and Sarees in My 2009.

        11. Trying to divide Sri Lanka when most Tamils live in the Sinhalese areas and do really well.

        I mean stupid Vedda the list is endless. How come you who are so knowledgeable are so ignorant about the LTTE. Funny that.

        And this is the bunch of appalling Goondas Lasantha was trying to save.
        After Lasanthas religious conversion to Christianity he has become radicalised (like an Islamic kid becoming radicalised) and became an LTTE supporter.

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          Good Student – what is the ideology/policy of successive Sri Lanka Sinhal Buddhist Government.

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          Good Student with very bad education

          I asked Tisass to explain LTTE’s ideology, not what they did or what you assumed as they did.

          Stupid

          Ideology is simply
          “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.”

          Could you shove all that you have been typing in your …. you know where.
          Learn before typing.

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          Good student:
          You are, very obviously, using a pseudonym that should, rightfully, be used by someone else. Just in case, quantity, particularly in the matter of verbiage, does NOT add up to quality. Comprende?

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      Having had to flee Colombo in my youth after the first anti-Tamil riots in 1958, I used to read The Sunday Leader when I came upon it in Europe. I have never felt that it was pro-LTTE, I think Lasantha Wickramatunge was critical of the Government basically because he did not believe that the ends can ever justify the means, the same reason for which many people of Tamil origin did not support the LTTE, despite having experienced the pogroms of 1983.
      The massacre of civilians in May 2009, which is amply documented, illustrates the type of brutality that Wickramatunge wrote about.
      Those who want to give Buddhism its rightful place should begin by practising what the Buddha taught. He did not teach nationalism.

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    A sad story but it must be told. If what is written is true, even Lasantha himself was not sure it was worth it. Did he go too far? I believe he did.

    What was it all for? Hardcore Raja followers will not be dissuaded from voting, and minorities will not vote for the Rajas so then must be for the fickle swing voters 17 percent.

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      Vanguard

      “Did he go too far? I believe he did.”

      How far is too far?
      Will you give us some examples?

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    I was at the Panel discussion today on “Lasantha and Investigative Journalism”. Amal Jayasinghe of AFP made a startling statement. The Lawyer who appeared for Lasantha in the MIG case was also one of the pall bearers at his funeral. NOW he is Gota’s Lawyer for his MIG case!

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    Lasantha was a talented Editor but paid the ultimate price for taking on the Paks-ass. Gotha the architect of the killing is still roaming free recently retorted who is Lasantha is. Little did he know that god has finally decided to bring this sad saga 10 years on to a close. . The US is at the moment working on a Plea Bargain to catch Gotha for his Crimes . He will soon be heading to a US jail.where hardened Criminals will slit his throat. Gotha must be shitting in his pants. God knows whether he wears Pants or Nappies.

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    Ahimsa!
    What a beautiful name’. Ahimsa in Tamil means nonviolence may be in some other languages too. Unfortunately Lasntha died by violent means.. I wonder whether Lasnatha had premonition that he will one day die by violence and he named his daughter Ahimsa. What ever it is violence runs in some politicians veins and the veins take time to burst..

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    Ahimsa,

    I really feel sorry for you. The pain and the loss of your farther under those terrible circumstances must be appalling.

    You may be right about “What they did to your father”, but you are wrong about “Why they did it”.
    You see in the scheme of things the MiG deal was n’t a big deal. Yes the SLAF has previously for decades bought dodgy equipment from the Chinese and others which crashed etc.

    Whether the MIG deal was corrupt or not does not matter. What mattered was getting rid of Prabhakaran and HIS goondas. Even Tamils (eg Eastern Tamils, EPDP, Tamil civilians who clearly wanted to get away from the LTTE, when 300,000 of them were held hostage by Prabhakaran which the whole world saw) were supporting the war effort and your foolish father opposed it, BECAUSE HE WAS AN LTTE SYMPATHISER.

    Your father should have let the government finish off the LTTE and his outstanding journalistic skills should have been saved to serve the country AFTER the war. Imagine what he could have written about the Yahapalanya corruptions, not just MR’s especially the “Bond scam” mother of all scams, the MiG deal is small beer by comparison.

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      Stupid Student

      Idiot why dont you back to basics and learn ABCD. Stupid boy you are taliking a lot of rubbish.Thank god the time is up for racists like you.

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        head teacher

        Did you apply corporal punishment to this stupid student very often?
        Rather than corporal punishment he should have spent a year or two in one of those tough boot camps in the USA then a few years in Buddhist Forest Monasteries in deep jungles of this island.
        I blame you.

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    Sunday Leader once got fined from courts for fabricated news on Chadrika Kumaratunga. It proved that Lasantha was not a clean man as depicted by his daughter. We know for any daughter her father is a hero. Nice English does not mean everything is right.

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    Kala veddah/Angoda Veddah/Native veddah,

    Still you did not meet Prabhakaran in the hell to ask about LTTE Ideology?

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    Did you check what sarath fonseka had to do with this?????

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    dear Ahimsa

    your fathers killers will be roaming around free as long as sirisena and ranil are in power.sad situ.

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    Dear Ahimsa

    Our hearts go out to you. You had a brave father who, no doubt, battled with his conscience to tell the truth. It is the lot of every journalist, but your father was brave enough to stick his neck out. The evil cowards who did the vile deed that took your father from us will never sleep soundly. They will be pursued by the ghosts of Justice up to the time they draw their last cowardly breaths.

    Just having a free press is not enough, unless there is freedom to speak the truth, however inconvenient.

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      Spring Koha:
      Thank you. It is such a pleasure to read an intelligent and literate comment in CT these days!

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    ahimsa

    you should take a cue from hirunicker and fight hard to get your fathers killers locked up like duminda getting locked because hirunicker fought like a lioness.She did that because she loved her dad very much.You have not made any progress for the last 4 years of this government.people will think if the family is not in the forefront to get justice why should we stick our necks out for them.

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