The Magistrate said that the absence of the Attorney General’s Department was an obstruction of justice. Human rights agencies say the manifest reluctance on the part of the state’s law enforcement authorities in such an important case encourages impunity.
Over 300 Tamils were arrested in Colombo on 2 April in search operations. Police say they had all arrived in the city recently from the north-east. The government suspects many Black Tiger suicide members are hidden among the 150,000 Tamil refugees in Colombo.
Tamil MP Joseph Pararajasingham says 1,700 Tamil youths are currently in detention suspected of LTTE links. Eighty eight youths arrested in May 1996 in Jaffna were recently found to be held at the Youth Rehabilitation Centre in Wiravila in Hambantota District, 85 miles south of Colombo. The youths say in a letter to Mr Pararajasingham that they were assaulted after arrest and forced to sign confessions in the Sinhala language. None of them has been produced before a court.
Eighty nine others also arrested in Jaffna and sent to Colombo in December 1996 are expected to be produced before the Anuradhapura courts in early April. In late March, a Colombo magistrate ordered the release of Mariyanayagi Peter arrested on 24 February and detained. She had come to Colombo from the north to join her husband abroad.
Addressing the 53rd Session of the UN Human Rights Commission in March, Tamil Congress leader Kumar Ponnambalam said there was total disregard of the principles relating to arrest and detention in Sri Lanka and Tamils were tortured and confessions manufactured. There has been a startling increase in gang-rape, involuntary disappearances in the north-east and in Colombo and in cases of extra-judicial executions. Mr Ponnambalam was detained briefly at the Colombo airport on his way to the UN Sessions in Geneva and documents on torture removed from him.
In his speech Sri Lanka’s ambassador to the UN, AB Goonetilleke empahasized his country’s commitment to human rights and in a reference to the LTTE, warned the Commission to be circumspect of organisations ostensibly promoting minority rights while acting as agents of groups threatening the integrity of sovereign states.