Sri Lanka’s Office on Missing Persons has compiled a verified list of 23,352 missing individuals after consolidating thousands of duplicate records, eight years after the body was established to resolve cases of enforced disappearance.
OMP Chairman Mahesh Katulanda told reporters the office initially absorbed around 42,000 complaints from past presidential commissions, UN agencies and international organisations including the ICRC. Many families had filed multiple complaints with different institutions, and historical manual record-keeping — compounded by the absence of National Identity Cards during earlier periods of conflict — made tracking difficult.
“Our primary challenge was to properly verify these complaints and identify duplicate or multiple entries for the same individual, as well as duplicated records,” Katulanda said. “That was a major challenge because, at that time, we did not have a centralized database.”
Through manual verification and direct engagement with families, officials streamlined the records into a database of 23,352 entries. The list includes 16,966 active cases involving civilians, alongside a separate category covering missing military and police personnel.
OMP officials have met face to face with 9,072 families across the island to carry out primary inquiries. The government has disbursed one-time interim relief payments to more than 5,700 families, with recommendations submitted for over 2,000 more.
Katulanda said the Cabinet recently allocated 375 million rupees to fund outreach to families, and the ministry has authorised the OMP to recruit 69 additional staff, including legal officers, tracing investigators, psycho-social support personnel and administrative workers.
The office aims to reach 13,000 to 14,000 families by the end of this year.
“People who once engaged in street protests to express their grief and pain have now joined hands with us,” Katulanda said.
The OMP will hold its main commemoration for the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on August 25 in Jaffna, followed by regional events in the Northern, Eastern and Southern provinces.
