Colombo enacts farcical show in Mirusuvil massacre case
Staff sergeant Sunil Ratnayake was sentenced to death by the Colombo High Court on 25 June 2015. He was part of an elite LRRP squad. The victims, including two teenagers and a 5-year-old child, were tortured and slain on 19 December 2000 at Mirusuvil. The postmortem report established that the throats of the victims were cut with sharp knives and their arms and legs had been chopped off. The massacre was definitely not the work of a soldier who had gone mad, Tamil legal sources who took part in the initial investigations in Jaffna told TamilNet. [Photo courtesy: Wasitha Patabendege, Daily News]
[TamilNet, Saturday, 04 July 2015, 17:21 GMT]As part of a concerted showdown in its campaign to transform the Geneva-based OISL investigation discourse into a domestic investigation, the Sri Lankan legal system was recently deployed to ‘demonstrate’ its ‘capacity‘ to 'investigate' what would be described by the human rights defenders as a ‘mass atrocity’ crime. The case, in which one non-commissioned officer of the Sri Lankan Army, Staff Sergeant Sunil Rathnayake, was sentenced to capital punishment, was in fact a genocidal crime in which several Sinhala soldiers, including a captain rank officer having command responsibility, took part. The main surviving witness in the case, who narrowly escaped the brutal massacre, had identified in 2001 the culprits, who belonged to the notorious ‘Deep Penetration Unit’, which was trained by Colombo to commit genocidal acts.
