sri lanka's commissions of inquiry - Law & Society Trust

Senior Superintendent of the area simultaneous with the incident,
and recorded as a disappearance. R's corpse was discovered
floating in the sea the next day, with gun-shot injuries through the
neck. This series of incidents received wide publicity nationally
and internationally. At the inquest the Magistrate ordered the
arrest of a senior police officer identified by R's mother to be one
of the abductors of her son. The order was not carried out. The
reports of investigation filed by police in court instead referred to
an anonymous letter received by the police containing a general
allegation of a connection of the deceased to an incident of
murder of a film star’s girl-friend which was currently a popular
sensation. On the day R's mother was due to give evidence on oath
and be available for cross-examination by the several lawyers for
the defense, the representative of the Attorney General stated
that he would not be calling her as witness as her evidence
was ‘irrelevant’. The Magistrate accordingly terminated the
proceedings. Files at the Attorney General’s Department shows
that the AG in August directed the Inspector-General of Police
to ‘hold further investigations’. There is no record of further
investigations by the police/further directions by the AG. 71
Subversion of justice through distortions in investigations was
highlighted through an additional three cases – the Dambarella
Incident, the Mawarala Incident, and the Dickwella Incident. These
cases are described to demonstrate that non-investigation of cases was
“not isolated departures-from-practice or ‘excesses.’ They exemplify
a generalised practice, which in its turn warrants the reasonable
inference that this practice denotes a generalised direction NOT to
investigate such incident (emphasis original).” 72
The unpublished Volume II of the Southern Commission’s Report
focuses on some of the key cases relating to disappearances and killings
71.
Final Report, Southern Commission, p. 53 – 54.
72.
Final Report, Southern Commission, p. 55.
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