A psycho gets his just deserts
Editorial-September 4, 2014
A cold-blooded brute in the garb of a doctor has been sentenced to death for raping and murdering a poor garment factory girl, Chamila Dissanayake (23), at the Negombo General Hospital in November 2007. Having sexually assaulted and strangled her to death, Dr. Indika Sudarshan Balage plunged her body out of the sixth floor of a hospital building where he had his apartment in a bid to make the incident look like a case of suicide.
The credit for conducting a thorough investigation into the killing and ensuring the brute’s conviction should go to the police and those who came forward to give evidence. But, the murderer would have got away with his crime with the help of some hospital workers who shamelessly sided with him but for a courageous woman, nay a heroine, who foiled his plan. L. M. Beatrice is her name. It was based on her statement that the police were able to arrest the suspect and build a solid case against him.
Beatrice, a poor mother of four, was slaving away at the Negombo hospital for a meagre wage at the time of the incident, but she was intrepid, considerate and principled enough to be on the side of the truth in the face of pressure brought to bear on her by a group of hospital workers who backed the murderous doc to the hilt. Nurses and even some doctors ganged up against her and went all out to frighten her into submission. She was harassed in every possible way and even hounded out of her job. The manpower agency she worked for yielded to pressure from some doctors and discontinued her service.
The Island fought quite a battle to defeat the attempts to silence Beatrice. This is what we said editorially on March 07, 2008 following several news items exposing the sinister attempts to save the murderer and make Beatrice regret having helped the police arrest him: "Beatrice, who stood up to pressure from the high and mighty in the name of justice, ought to be honoured. We hope she won’t be forgotten when the International Women’s Day is celebrated tomorrow … Beatrice, a woman worth her weight in silver, if not gold, is drawing as little as Rs. 285 a day for her hard work, that, too, after a continuous service of seven years!" Later the Labour Department made an intervention on her behalf and she was reinstated.
Ironically, weeks later, the nurses who sided with the Negombo doctor in an abortive bid to hush up the killing of the garment worker had to launch a protest, condemning another doctor who had given a junior Nightingale a jab against her will by way of punishment for a mistake she had made at a hospital in Ratnapura. Nurses locked horns with doctors at the Peradeniya Teaching Hospital over a duty room shortly after the Negombo murder. They were also set upon by a group of medical students there. It was a case of poetic justice.
It is heartening that justice has triumphed albeit with some delay and a psycho has been thrown behind bars. Else, he would have killed more women. He may not be hanged as our politicians are too pious to authorise judicial executions—they, however, have no qualms about ordering or condoning extrajudicial killings—but life will be far worse than death for him in the hellholes that are our prisons.
Thankfully, the judgment in the Negombo hospital murder has come at a time people are increasingly becoming disillusioned with the justice dispensation system owing to its leniency towards politically connected criminals. It is like a drizzle in a drought-stricken, parched land.
