The Attorney General has concluded that fresh investigations should be carried out into the killings allegedly linked to the Batalanda torture chamber, and has forwarded observations setting out that conclusion to the Secretary to the President, NewsFirst reported.
The Attorney General’s Department’s position is that indictments cannot be filed against suspects on the strength of the Batalanda Commission Report alone. The evidence the report contains is not by itself sufficient to bring alleged perpetrators before court.
Those two findings pull in opposite directions, and together they define where the case now stands. The report is not a dead letter — the Attorney General wants the allegations pursued. But it cannot be used as a prosecution file. Anything brought to court will have to rest on evidence gathered afresh, into killings alleged to have taken place between 1988 and 1990.
What the Batalanda Commission was
Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was elected President in 1994, ending 17 years of United National Party rule. A central pledge of her campaign was justice for the killings and disappearances of the 1988–1990 period.
By an order issued on 21 September 1995, she appointed a Presidential Commission of Inquiry that became known as the Batalanda Commission. Its remit was to investigate allegations that young people had been unlawfully detained, tortured, killed or disappeared in houses inside the Batalanda Housing Scheme at Biyagama — a property owned by the State Fertilizer Manufacturing Corporation — and to identify those responsible.
The Commission received twelve extensions before handing its report to Kumaratunga on 26 March 1998.
What the report says about the houses
NewsFirst’s account summarises the Commission’s findings on how individual houses in the scheme were used. These are the report’s assertions, not established facts, and they are recorded here as such.
House A2/2 was reportedly used by former President Ranil Wickremesinghe from 1983 until April 1989 as a holiday bungalow belonging to the Ministry of Youth Affairs and Employment, and from April 1989 to 1994 as his official residence as Minister of Industries. House A2/1 was allocated to his security personnel and A2/3 to a ministry under his purview. Houses A1/7 and B1 were also reportedly used by security personnel attached to him.
House B2 was allegedly used by Wickremesinghe as an office. The report records that it was identified by a person who said he had been tortured there and escaped.
The report states that House B7 was used by then Police Inspector Sudath Chandrasekara, a personal security officer to Wickremesinghe, and that House B8 nearby was used by security personnel attached to Superintendent of Police Douglas Peiris.
A witness named Earl Sugi Perera testified that he had been held and tortured at that location. “I was detained and beaten for 23 days,” he told the Commission, offering to identify members of the security detail he said had assaulted detainees.
The Commission also heard that Vincent Fernando, the caretaker of Wickremesinghe’s bungalow who lived on the premises, died in unexplained circumstances shortly before Wickremesinghe was due to give evidence.
No one has been charged over any of these allegations. NewsFirst’s report carries no response from Wickremesinghe or from any other person named in it.
Twenty-eight years in abeyance
The report sat without action for more than a quarter of a century. Leader of the House Bimal Rathnayake tabled it in Parliament on 14 March 2025, and it has since returned to public debate amid expectations that it could bear on a number of large-scale crimes from the period.
The Attorney General’s advice is the first formal indication of what the state intends to do with it. In practical terms it means investigators would be opening inquiries into deaths that occurred at least 36 years ago, with witnesses, suspects and physical evidence correspondingly aged.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not say how many killings the Attorney General’s observations cover, or whether any are identified individually. It does not name the agency that would conduct the fresh investigations, give any timeline, or say whether the Attorney General addressed whether any of the offences are now statute-barred. It records no response from the Secretary to the President and no indication of what the President intends to do with the observations. No suspect is named, and the report does not say whether the Attorney General considered the Commission’s own recommendations, which included the revocation of civil rights for those it implicated.
This story was reported by NewsFirst and had not been carried by another verified newsroom at the time of writing. Ada Derana’s site remained unreachable for an eleventh consecutive day.
