Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Twenty-six years after journalist Mylvaganam Nimalarajan was murdered in his Jaffna home, Jaffna Monitor reconstructs his final night through his wounded father’s testimony, contemporary newspaper reports, family recollections and the account of the colleague who broadcast his final news report. Shortly before 9:45 p.m. The BBC Tamil Service news ran from 9:15 to 9:45 every night. On Thursday, October 19, 2000, Kanapathipillai Mylvaganam was listening to it from a reclining chair in the livin

By ARULINIYAN MAHALINGAM Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry announced on Oct. 14 that it had executed a Bangladeshi man and a woman in the Mecca region after a court convicted them of indecent acts inside a mosque. Bangladesh’s consulate in Jeddah learned of the executions after they had taken place. The day before, Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court had set aside the death sentence of Sivarasa Anojan, a 24-year-old Tamil worker from Kalmunai in eastern Sri Lanka, who was condemned over a Facebook com

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam MIHINTALE, Sri Lanka, Oct. 19 — Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Sunday that the constitutional provision giving Buddhism the foremost place in Sri Lanka originated in an agreement between British colonial authorities and the chiefs of the Kandyan kingdom, and that Sri Lankans had not created it. The documentary record supports the first part of that account. The Kandyan Convention of 1815 did commit the British Crown to protect Buddhism. The words now in

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Between 6:30 and 7 p.m. on Oct. 15, 1986, a fishing trawler carrying about 23 people left the Karaiyoor shore at Gurunagar, on the edge of Jaffna town, for Delft Island, a crossing of a few hours. The boat never reached Delft, and no trace of it or of anyone aboard has been found since. Among the passengers was Visuvalingam Visuvananthathevan, 33, an engineer and Marxist organizer who had founded two small Tamil left-wing movements, the National Lib

OSLO — Navanethem Pillay, the South African jurist whose demands for an international investigation into the final months of Sri Lanka’s civil war made her a defining figure for war-affected Tamils and a target of the Rajapaksa government, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said it was honoring Ms. Pillay, 85, known as Navi, for her work to advance “a more comprehensive global legal order” and to ensure that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocid

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam The president told senior clergy that the drafters of Sri Lanka’s prison regulations may not have expected monks to be imprisoned. Colonial records show monks tried for treason, jailed in Jaffna and Kandy, and executed in their robes before the law was written. A court ruled on a monk stripped of his robes in prison more than a century ago. JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — More than 120 years ago, a Buddhist monk walked out of a colonial prison in Ceylon without his robes. The pris