Jaffna Monitor

Colombo — Shortly after 10 p.m. on a Saturday in late April, a Thai AirAsia jet from Bangkok touched down at Bandaranaike International Airport. Among the passengers, twenty-two young men in saffron robes filed quietly toward the arrivals hall, the way Buddhist monks in transit have moved through this airport for decades — without much notice, and almost without question. They did not get that far. By dawn on Sunday, officers of the Police Narcotics Bureau had laid out the contents of their su

They came through the doors shortly after ten at night, a small procession of exhausted travellers shuffling beneath an arch of blue-and-white balloons. A red carpet had been unrolled across the polished floor of Terminal 1. In the distance, a loudspeaker played “Oseh Shalom,” the old peace song that has become a runway anthem for Israeli homecomings. The men wore knitted kippot or hats. The married women wore head coverings, as is customary in Orthodox Judaism. Many were weeping. There were m