Former Western Provincial Councillor and Attorney-at-Law Shiral Lakthilake has called on President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Health Minister Dr. Nalinda Jayatissa to order a “psychological autopsy” into the death of Ranga Rajapaksa, the Finance Ministry official suspended over the alleged USD 2.5 million Treasury cyber theft.
Lakthilake’s intervention is the first formal legal challenge to the four-Judicial Medical Consultant panel’s ruling on Friday that Rajapaksa took his own life at his Kuliyapitiya home on April 30, with all injuries determined to be self-inflicted.
In a statement, Lakthilake said serious suspicions had arisen because the Secretary to the Ministry of Finance had allegedly “covered up” the underlying financial fraud for four months before its disclosure. The suspension of Rajapaksa, he said, was bound up in that wider sequence and the circumstances of the death warranted further forensic scrutiny beyond the standard post-mortem.
Citing the assassinated rugby player Wasim Thajudeen as precedent, Lakthilake said: “Regarding the death of the Treasury official, a team of forensic medical officers officially declared yesterday that this was a suicide. We know that Sri Lanka has a notorious history of forensic medical officer reports, whether about suicides or deaths.”
“Official forensic medical reports also came in connection with Thajudeen’s death. But later, we learned that those official forensic medical reports were not as accurate as they were said to be,” he said. “We are requesting the President of Sri Lanka and the Minister of Health that the medical examination report is good. But there is another step in medical science to take action in this regard. We are asking for a psychological autopsy to be conducted in this regard.”
A psychological autopsy is a structured retrospective investigation into a person’s mental state, motivations and circumstances in the period before death — used internationally to test whether a death ruled a suicide could plausibly have been homicide or coercion staged as self-harm.
The intervention follows businessman Dilith Jayaweera’s earlier framing of Rajapaksa as a “whistleblower” whose information about the Treasury fraud led to his death — a connection the government has not endorsed and which the JMO panel’s findings did not address. Rajapaksa’s final rites were held on Saturday evening.
The underlying USD 2.5 million Business Email Compromise fraud — in which a foreign-debt repayment was diverted to a hacker-controlled account — remains under active CID and CBSL investigation, with five Finance Ministry officials interdicted and Treasury Secretary Dr. Harshana Suriyapperuma having appeared before the parliamentary Committee on Public Finance on April 30 hours before Rajapaksa’s death.
If you or someone you know is in distress, contact the National Mental Health Helpline on 1926 or Sumithrayo on +94 11 2682535.
Source: Ada Derana
