The Jaffna Magistrate’s Court has ordered former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to appear before the Colombo Magistrate’s Court on September 29 and give evidence to the Jaffna court by online link in the case concerning the alleged abduction and disappearance of activists Lalith Kumar Weeraraj and Kugan Muruganandan.
The order was issued when the case was taken up on Friday before Jaffna Chief Magistrate S. Lenin Kumar, NewsFirst reported. NewsFirst gave the date only as “the 29th” without naming a month; Hiru News reported it explicitly as September 29.
The case
Weeraraj and Muruganandan disappeared in the Avarangal area of Jaffna on December 10, 2011, while organising a protest by relatives of the disappeared timed to coincide with International Human Rights Day, according to Hiru News. Rajapaksa was serving as Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary at the time.
Their relatives filed a habeas corpus petition before the Court of Appeal in Colombo in 2012. The inquiry has run for more than a decade.
Rajapaksa was first issued notices in the case in September 2019. He later told the Supreme Court he was willing to testify, but sought to appear before a court in Colombo rather than Jaffna, citing security concerns, and was directed at one stage to put those claims on record by affidavit.
In June the Jaffna Magistrate’s Court granted him permission to testify via video link. Friday’s order fixes the date and the venue from which he is to give that evidence.
The proceedings are one of several war-era and post-war accountability cases still moving through the courts, alongside continuing excavation at the Chemmani mass grave in Jaffna.
