Gotabhaya Rajapakse not Sarath Fonseka responsible for killing of journalists and politicians says UTHR reports

(February 27, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) According reports from University Teachers for Human Rights – Jaffna, it is Defence Secretary not Army Commander that was responsible for waves of killings that took place in Colombo.

UTHR report on February 2008 states, “The Defence Ministry, which functions as the property of an American citizen and the President’s brother, moved virtually to extort public funds from Parliament, to serve also as a source of fat commissions. And we are celebrating 60 years of independence from colonial rule. The apparatus of state-terror now in place has a political agenda going well beyond taming the Tigers. The killing of MP Raviraj discussed below shows poignantly the Government going down to the lowest depths in a bid to control MPs by terror. “

UTHR report goes furthermore exposing the real face of terror. “The killer apparatus, it was widely spoken and as the circumstances below strongly indicate, functioned under Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse. While the principal details below are from one trusted source, important ties have been confirmed by information from other
independent sources, such as Pillayan’s relationship to the intelligence operative Wasantha and their PNM connections. Two important intelligence operatives who deal closely with Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapakse (GR) are Kamaldeen from the Navy based in Trincomalee and Commanding Officer Tennekoon, of the Army from the
Gemunu Watch, based in Welikanda. The latter has rank probably of major or above. Dealing with and directing killer operatives from the Karuna (Pillayan) group and EPDP are Sampath, ex-naval intelligence, who is under Kamaldeen and Wasantha who is under Tennekoon. Sources in Batticaloa have linked Pillayan with Wasantha and the PNM has also been mentioned to us in this connection,” according to UTHR report on February 2008.

“We may describe the terror apparatus as having three levels. At the lowest are cadres from the Karuna group, operatives from the EPDP, Muslim paramilitary elements and deserters from the LTTE. The second comprises cadres from the JHU, PNM and the intelligence services, all dealing with persons from the third layer. The topmost layer comprises the State, represented by the Defence Ministry and especially the Defence Secretary, dealing with the second, and occasionally with the third, usually through the second. They try to negotiate boundaries, relations and tensions between the second.”

It also added that “The circumstances above point to Gotabhaya Rajapakse as ultimately the man who initiated the killing of Raviraj.The immediate purpose appears to have been the silencing of the Civil Monitoring Committee, whose reports on abductions, killings and extortion by Gotabhaya’s covert outfits, created a huge stink. It is hard to accept that the President who delegated the running of the Defence Ministry to his younger brother and was personally a patron of Ven. M was not party to what was going on. He has a good deal of explaining to do.

Even worse, no one could accuse Gotabhaya of being secretive. The country as a whole had a good sense of what was going on. People were being targeted and killed and were disappearing after abduction, the total now running into thousands, by killers closely linked to the Defence Ministry. Also killed have been a number of media workers.
When the President persists in maintaining as defence secretary the very man who threatened the woman editor of a leading newspaper with the Karuna group and one of her staff with elimination, he has no real defence against the worst sort of allegations.”

The full report can be found at :- FULL REPORT ( AN EXTERNAL LINK)