Disappeared Tamil youth found in state custody after five years

A Tamil mother from northern Sri Lanka who had been searching for her son for five years has found him badly beaten, handcuffed and lying unconscious in a government hospital in Colombo.

The mother from Iluppaikadavai in the Mannar district, Muthurasa Reeza managed to trace her son once Tamil media published the names of political prisoners hospitalized after government security forces stormed the Vavunia prison in a ‘rescue assault’ on the 30th of June. Her son Muthurasa Dilrukshan along with several other Tamil political prisoners had been brutally attacked first by the military and Special Task Force (STF) and then by prison officials. Some of the 31 prisoners removed to the Mahara prison have been hospitalized later.

“My son has injuries to his neck, chest and legs while his head is encased in bandages,” the mother has told BBC after seeing Dilrukshan lying in the north Colombo hospital in Ragama, ten days after the Vavunia prison attack. She was unhappy with the medical treatment in a regular ward, as her unconscious son needed treatment in an Intensive Care Unit.

Arrested in 2007

Muthurasa Dilrukshan had been missing since his arrest by the Sri Lankan Navy in 2007 when he tried to flee the war torn north in a boat. His intention had been to find employment in the Middle East where he had worked before. The journey abroad ended when the boat was intercepted by the Sri Lankan Navy (SLN). A month later, the mother has received a letter from him saying that he is held in a Sri Lanka military camp in Kalimottai. Muthurasa Reeza who herself was forced to flee the intensifying assault of the Sri Lankan military, had been unable to reach the camp detaining her son.

Displaced many times, she ended up in the Menik Farm detention camp for war refugees when the Sri Lankan government declared its military victory over Tamil Tigers two years later. Towards the end of 2009, she was relocated to a transition camp in Kalimottai. The military camp in Kalimottai mentioned in the final letter she received from her son in 2007, has been dismantled.  Since then, the mother had appealed to the police, the Red Cross and Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission to find her son. Until Tamil media published the names of victims in the Vavunia prison assault in July 2012, Muthurasa Reeza was unable to locate her son.

In its annual report for 2011 the International Committee of the Red Cross stated that the number of disappearances recorded by them in Sri Lanka exceeds 15,000.

Photo courtesy: Sampath Samarakoon | vikalpa.org

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