Our Reporter

COLOMBO — Sri Lanka’s Criminal Investigation Department has refused to allow daily visits by the lawyer of Major General (Retired) Suresh Sallay, the former director of the State Intelligence Service, who is being treated in hospital after a hunger strike in detention, according to a letter from the department obtained by Jaffna Monitor. In the letter, dated June 13 and signed by Senior Superintendent of Police Shani Abeysekara, the CID director, the agency told Sallay’s wife that her husband’s

COLOMBO – More than 5,000 Bharatnatyam dancers from Sri Lanka, India, and other countries gave a scintillating, choreographed performance in Colombo on Sunday (June 14) to earn a Guinness World Record citation for the largest dance lesson in one of India’s oldest classical dance forms. The colourful and mesmerizing event was organised jointly by the Sangamam Global Academy of India and the Samgamizh Liya of Sri Lanka at the Galle Face Green promenade in the capital. After the performers, dress

JAFFNA — A faction of senior leaders within the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO) has accused the party's top leadership of subverting internal democracy by delaying the organization's national convention and manipulating district-level selections to entrench themselves in power, according to statements made at a press conference held Saturday at the Jaffna Media Centre. The dissidents said the party has suffered repeated electoral losses, administrative dysfunction, and a string of co

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Lawyers for Maj. Gen. Suresh Sallay, the former head of Sri Lanka's State Intelligence Service, told the Court of Appeal on Thursday that the senior police officers investigating him over the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings had themselves been faulted by official inquiries for failing to prevent the attacks. The argument was made during a hearing on a writ petition filed by General Sallay, who is challenging the legality of his arrest and subsequent detention under the Preventi

COLOMBO — Japan and the United Nations Development Programme signed an agreement with the Sri Lankan government on Wednesday to fund disaster waste clearance and the rehabilitation of community facilities in areas devastated by Cyclone Ditwah, which struck the island in late November and affected an estimated 1.7 million people. The project will focus on the Central Province — the districts of Kandy, Matale, and Nuwara Eliya — where the cyclone caused some of the worst damage to infrastructure,

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The opposition figures staging a sit-in for a detained former intelligence chief are not defending him out of concern for his welfare but are trying to halt the investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings before it reaches the people who planned them, Sri Lanka’s justice minister told Parliament on Tuesday. Harshana Nanayakkara, the minister of justice and national integration, said the campaign on behalf of Suresh Sallay, a retired major general and former head of t

COLOMBO — More than 200 officials from Sri Lanka's central bank, licensed financial institutions, corporate entities, and public sector bodies have completed training in applying the country's Green Finance Taxonomy, part of a European Union-funded effort to direct more financing toward environmentally sustainable projects. The taxonomy, developed by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and published in May 2022, sets out a framework for classifying which economic activities count as environmentally s