> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Four Summoned Over Thileepan Bust That Apparently Installed Itself - URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/four-summoned-over-thileepan-bust-that-apparently-installed-itself/ - Published: 2026-10-05T02:23:46.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-05T02:54:32.000Z - Author: Our Reporter - Tags: October 2026 **JAFFNA, Sri Lanka —** Police in Jaffna have summoned four people for questioning over a bust of Thileepan, the Tamil Tiger political leader, widening an investigation that has already reached the courts. The party that led the commemoration has defended the bust at every turn since police took it away. It has not said who put it there. The bust stood at Thileepan's memorial near the Nallur Kandaswamy Temple during the 12 days of commemorations marking his death in a hunger strike in 1987\. More than 20 police officers removed it before dawn on Sept. 27, hours after the commemorations ended. The removal set off protests across the Tamil-majority north and a bitter round of accusations among Tamil parties and President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's government. The four were ordered to appear at the Jaffna police on Monday morning. They are Selvarajah Kajendren, general secretary of the Tamil National People's Front, which organized the commemorations; a man known as Pon Master; and two members of a rival party, the Tamil Makkal Kootani, or Tamil People's Alliance: Varatharajan Partheepan and Pathmanathan Mayooran, chairman of the Nallur Pradeshiya Sabha, a local council. The summonses came two days after the Jaffna Magistrate's Court declined to take the seized bust into its custody. According to accounts of Friday's hearing, the magistrate asked the police why they had not established who erected it and on what basis they had brought it to court. The police took the bust back to their Jaffna headquarters and said they would seek the attorney general's advice. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam remains banned in Sri Lanka, and the inquiry has been linked to the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Officers have also examined the playing of commemorative songs and the use of sound equipment at the memorial. Mr. Partheepan said on Sunday that officers had delivered a summons to his home written entirely in Sinhala, a language he cannot read. He ran it through an artificial intelligence tool and posted the translation on Facebook. According to that translation, the letter, dated Oct. 4, directed him and Mr. Mayooran to give statements to the Jaffna Divisional Crime Investigation Division about "the installation of a new statue of Rasaiah Parthipan, known as Thileepan," Thileepan's birth name. "Neither of us has had anything whatsoever to do with the installation of the statue," Mr. Partheepan wrote. He said his role was limited to an archival exhibition he had run with official permission for four years, and he questioned why Mr. Mayooran had been summoned. The two parties have feuded for years over who should run the Thileepan commemorations, which carry deep emotional weight for many Tamils and draw substantial donations from supporters in Sri Lanka and abroad. They settled the matter by dividing the ground. The Tamil National People's Front took the main memorial site, and figures linked to the Tamil Makkal Kootani took an exhibition next door. A former member of the Front familiar with the arrangement said it had proved "mutually beneficial" to both sides, not least financially. The arrangement has now produced an awkward result. The men who ran the exhibition are being questioned about the bust. The party that ran the site where it stood is not saying who installed it. Mr. Kajendren has been specific about who he believes was behind the removal. He has accused the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi, or ITAK, which controls the Jaffna Municipal Council, of acting on behalf of the police and collaborating with the government. He has also said that the party's acting leader, C.V.K. Sivagnanam, confronted him over the bust and threatened to remove it if it stayed after Sept. 26\. On the question of who put it up, he has said nothing publicly. S. Ragavan, a Jaffna resident, told Jaffna Monitor that the Front should own what it did. "They do not have the political morality to say, 'We installed the bust. Arrest us if you want,'" he said. Jaffna's mayor, Mathivathani Vivekanandarajah, an ITAK member, rejected Mr. Kajendren's accusations on Sunday. "We strongly condemn the removal," she told reporters. "Neither the Municipal Council nor the leadership of our party was responsible for its removal." She said the request for permission came before the council at its monthly meeting on Sept. 15, the first day of the commemorations, by which time the bust was already at the memorial. Because the request was for temporary permission, she consulted Mr. Sivagnanam, who told her the council could approve it and advised against sending the bust away. The council voted to let it remain until Sept. 26. The police repeatedly pressed the council to obtain a written undertaking from the organizers that the bust would be removed after that date, the mayor said. The council refused. Mr. Sivagnanam "did not oppose the placement of the bust," she said. "Therefore, the allegations against him are unfounded." Critics of the Front go further. They accuse it of deliberately provoking a confrontation by erecting a monument to a member of a banned organization in the expectation that the authorities would step in. One municipal official said the party had acted with the intention of "placing people at risk and discrediting our struggle." The Front has not publicly responded to that accusation. Thileepan was 23 when he began his fast near the Nallur temple on Sept. 15, 1987, less than two months after an accord between India and Sri Lanka brought Indian troops to the island. Refusing food and water, he pressed five demands, mostly directed at India, and died 12 days later. His death drew huge crowds in Jaffna and hastened the collapse of relations between the Tamil Tigers and India. Within weeks, Indian peacekeepers and the Tigers were at war. The Tigers went on to carry out suicide bombings, assassinations and attacks on civilians during Sri Lanka's civil war, which ended with their defeat in 2009\. Many Tamils in the north remember Thileepan chiefly for his hunger strike. His memorial in Nallur has been destroyed twice in past decades, and the commemorations have continued every year.