Salil Shetty, London | Thu, 03/22/2012 Kasippillai Manoharan listened to the frantic voice on the other end of the phone. His 20-year-old son, Ragihar, said he was surrounded by troops. Then the phone went dead.
Desperately, the Sri Lankan doctor tried to return the call but there was no answer.
Minutes earlier, Ragihar and his friends were sitting on the seafront in the port town of Trincomalee in north eastern Sri Lanka when an auto-rickshaw drove by. A grenade was tossed from the vehicle. It exploded, injuring several of them.
Violence was common in Trincomalee in 2006. The town had a substantial Sri Lankan military presence and was a target for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a brutal armed group that then controlled much of the country’s northern areas.
Navy guards quickly placed a security cordon around the area. Witnesses say that Special Task Force (STF) troops arrived, and initially threw the wounded students in the back of a jeep. Full Story>>>
