By Che Ran
Sri Lanka has discovered prison justice.
Wonderful.
Only took us forty-three years.
Twenty-eight people are dead after the July 2026 violence at Negombo Prison: 20 prisoners and eight prison officials. More than 100 were injured. The government appointed an investigative committee. Police investigations began. The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka launched its own inquiry. Ministers went to Parliament. Families demanded answers. Newspapers carried photographs of grieving relatives. Questions were asked about drugs, weapons, overcrowding, prison management, and responsibility.
Good.
Every damn one of those questions should be asked.
Every officer who died deserves justice.
Every prisoner who died deserves justice.
Every family deserves to know how somebody entrusted to the custody—or employment—of the Sri Lankan state went to work or went into a cell and did not come home.
There is only one uncomfortable problem.
Sri Lanka has seen people killed inside its prisons before.
And when some of those dead were Tamil, our national appetite for justice appears to have been considerably less energetic.
Let me take you to another July.
Not 2026.
1983.
And to another prison.
Not Negombo.
Welikada. Colombo.
There were 72 Tamil political prisoners being held there.
On July 25, 1983, 35 of them were killed.
The country then had an astonishing opportunity to demonstrate that this was an aberration.
It had two days.
Instead, on July 27, another 18 were killed.
Fifty-three Tamil prisoners dead inside one of the most secure institutions controlled by the Sri Lankan state.
This is not folklore. It is not diaspora mythology. It is not something somebody's uncle remembers hearing in Jaffna.
Amnesty International documented the case.
And the official legal record contains one sentence that should still make Sri Lanka profoundly uncomfortable:
The magisterial inquiries held the deaths to be cases of murder.
Not unfortunate deaths.
Not an unexplained prison disturbance.
Murder.
The magistrate ordered police to investigate further and bring suspects before court.
And then?
Nothing resembling criminal justice followed.
Amnesty's 1994 review records that prison officials claimed they could not identify those responsible. No one was prosecuted for the 53 killings.
That is not merely a historical curiosity.
That is a national obscenity.
First, let us correct the history
There is a temptation, especially when writing about atrocities, to make the facts bigger because the emotion already feels too large for ordinary language.
Don't.
The facts are savage enough.
It is not accurate to say that all 53 men had never been charged or convicted.
Amnesty's finding is more precise—and damning enough without embellishment.
There were 72 Tamil political prisoners at Welikada. Most of the 53 people killed were detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act and had not been convicted. Amnesty records that six of the 72 prisoners were serving sentences. Some prominent prisoners, including Kuttimani and Jegan, had been convicted.
That distinction matters.
Because justice either cares about facts or it is merely propaganda wearing a tie.
And whether a man was convicted, awaiting trial or never charged ultimately changes nothing about the state's obligation after locking the cell door.
A convicted murderer has rights.
A suspected terrorist has rights.
A drug dealer has rights.
A remand prisoner has rights.
A prison officer has rights.
The whole bloody point of justice is that you don't get to choose who qualifies for it.
Once the state takes custody of a human being, it assumes responsibility for that human being's safety.
You cannot imprison someone and then shrug when he is killed inside your prison.
That is not incarceration.
That is abandonment.
So let us say their names
History has a nasty habit of converting inconvenient people into numbers.
Fifty-three.
Easy.
Clean.
Almost administrative.
But 53 is not a person.
These were.
Contemporary lists contain variations in English transliteration, so spellings differ between sources. The following 35/18 roll follows a historical compilation published by M. Nithyanandan and is consistent with Amnesty's documented total of 53.
Killed on July 25, 1983
1. Kuttimany Yogarajah
2. N. Thangathurai
3. Nadesathasan
4. Jegan
5. Sivarasa
6. Sivan Anpalagan
7. Balasubramaniam
8. Suresh Kumar
9. Arunthavarajah
10. Thanabalasingham
11. Arafat
12. P. Mahendran
13. K. Thillainathan
14. S. Kularajesekaran
15. Uthaya Kumar
16. S. Sivakumar
17. A. Rajan
18. S. Balachandran
19. Yogachandran Kili
20. S. Subramaniam
21. Mylvaganam Sinniah
22. G. Mylvaganam
23. C. Sivanantharajah
24. T. Kandiah
25. S. Sathiyaseelan
26. Kathiravetpillai
27. Easvaranathan
28. K. Nagarajah
29. Gunapalan Ganeshalingham
30. Anbalagan Sundaram
31. Ramalingham Balachandran
32. K. Thavarajasingham
33. K. Krishnakumar
34. R. Yoganathan
35. A. Uthayakumar
Thirty-five.
Then Sri Lanka went to bed.
The prison remained a prison.
The government remained the government.
The locks remained on the doors.
The guards remained outside them.
Forty-eight hours later, the killing happened again.
Killed on July 27, 1983
36. Muthukumar Sri Kumar
37. Amirthanayagam Philip
38. Kulasingham Kumar
39. Selachami Kumar
40. Kandasamy Sarwesvaran
41. A. Mariampillai
42. Sivapatham Neethirajah
43. Devanayagam Paskaran
44. Ponniah Thurairajah, alias Thangathurai
45. Gnanamuthu Navaretnasingham
46. Kandiah Rajendran, alias Robert
47. Dr. Somasundaram Rajasundaram
48. Somasundaram Manoranjan
49. Arumugam Seyan, alias Appu
50. Thamotherampillai Jegamohanandan
51. Sinnathamby Sivasubramaniam
52. Selliah Rajaratnam
53. Kumarasamy Ganeshalingham
There.
Fifty-three.
Not "Tamil detainees."
Not "militants."
Not "prison casualties."
Names.
People.
And please notice something.
Among them was Dr. Somasundaram Rajasundaram, a medical doctor and secretary of the Gandhiyam movement.
There were political activists.
There were detainees.
There were convicted prisoners.
There were men accused under one of the most controversial pieces of security legislation Sri Lanka ever enacted.
They did not all have identical stories.
They did not need to.
A prisoner's right not to be murdered is not contingent upon his résumé.
The investigation that disappeared into the furniture
Sri Lanka sometimes says there was "no investigation" into Welikada.
Technically, that is not quite correct.
And the truth is actually more embarrassing.
There were magisterial inquiries.
They determined that the deaths were murders.
Prison officials testified that they could not identify the perpetrators.
The magistrate instructed the police to investigate further and produce suspects before the court.
That is where meaningful criminal accountability effectively died.
Think about the institutional absurdity.
Thirty-five prisoners are killed inside a high-security prison.
Nobody can identify the killers.
Two days later another eighteen prisoners are killed.
Again, apparently, accountability develops cataracts.
Fifty-three dead.
Zero prosecutions.
Sri Lankan historical material also records that the first inquiry failed to establish basic questions such as how attackers obtained weapons or got access to the Tamil prisoners.
Imagine trying that explanation today.
Imagine 53 tourists dying inside a government hotel and the staff announcing:
Sorry.
Couldn't identify anyone.
Imagine 53 parliamentarians dying inside Parliament and security saying:
Very confusing afternoon.
Imagine 53 bankers dying inside the Central Bank.
Would Sri Lanka still be investigating forty-three years later?
Don't be ridiculous.
Colombo would have run out of committees by lunchtime.
That is what selective governance looks like.
It is not always a law explicitly saying one ethnicity deserves less justice.
It is subtler.
One death produces a national emergency.
Another produces paperwork.
One victim gets a press conference.
Another gets a paragraph.
One investigation hunts perpetrators.
Another waits for witnesses to age.
Eventually bureaucracy performs the miracle politics could not:
time kills the case.
There actually was compensation. Sort of.
This, too, deserves accuracy.
Relatives of 30 murdered prisoners filed civil cases against the state in 1985, alleging failure to protect those in custody.
They persisted.
For almost another decade.
In April 1994, according to Amnesty, those cases were settled. The state agreed to make ex gratia payments without admitting liability.
There is something almost poetically bureaucratic about that phrase.
Without admitting liability.
Fifty-three prisoners killed.
Inside your prison.
Magistrates call it murder.
Nobody prosecuted.
And eventually some families receive money under a legal formula carefully designed not to say:
We failed you.
That is not justice.
It is accounting.
Now jump forward forty-three years
July 2026.
Negombo.
This time the dead include prison officers as well as inmates.
The government's initial explanation was that the violence grew out of conflict connected to drug smuggling. Justice Minister Harshana Nanayakkara told Parliament that prisoners who had passed information about trafficking to authorities became targets and that violence escalated after officers intervened. Investigations remain underway.
The final reported toll reached 28 dead: 20 prisoners and eight prison officials.
And Sri Lanka responded.
As it should.
A three-member government committee was announced.
The Human Rights Commission opened an investigation.
Authorities began examining the circumstances surrounding the violence.
Families got bodies back after post-mortems.
There was public mourning for the dead officers.
The country began asking questions.
Again:
good.
This article is not demanding less justice for Negombo.
It is demanding that Sri Lanka finally understand how obscene it is to ration justice according to whose coffin is being carried.
Then history performed a truly sick little trick
After Negombo, hundreds of prisoners were transferred elsewhere.
Some went to Welikada.
Yes.
That Welikada.
On July 7, 2026, the Human Rights Commission's Rapid Response Unit arrived there unannounced to check on inmates.
They were denied access.
The Commission says this violated its statutory authority to enter detention facilities without prior notice.
Access was subsequently permitted, but when prison officials later explained that the refusal resulted from an unstable security situation, the HRCSL said it was not satisfied with the explanation.
You could not write the symbolism without an editor accusing you of laying it on too thick.
Welikada.
A prison with 53 unprosecuted murders hanging over its history.
Forty-three years later.
Human-rights investigators arrive.
And initially cannot get through the gate.
History does not always rhyme.
Sometimes it walks into the room carrying a loudspeaker.
And then came allegations of mistreatment
The HRCSL says it is investigating allegations that some inmates transferred after the Negombo violence were subjected to torture or other ill-treatment.
Its officers observed injuries among some transferred prisoners and reported delays in medical treatment.
Two transferred prisoners subsequently died in custody.
The Commission has not yet made findings establishing what caused the injuries or deaths, and that caveat matters.
Amnesty International has called for urgent investigation.
So should everybody else.
Because here's the test.
Not whether the prisoners are nice.
Not whether Twitter likes them.
Not whether they have criminal records.
Not whether they are Tamil, Sinhala, Muslim, Burgher, rich, poor, politically useful or completely forgotten.
Did the state have custody of them?
Then investigate.
That should have been the principle in 1983.
It should be the principle in 2026.
It should be the principle forever.
Welikada was not even the last warning
Sri Lanka has had other catastrophic prison violence.
In 2012, another incident at Welikada left 27 prisoners dead and around 50 injured. A later committee recommended charges against several senior officials. Ultimately, according to Human Rights Watch and other rights groups, only two prison officials were charged and one was convicted at trial in 2022. Rights organisations argued that prosecuting a single official did not address the wider circumstances and systemic failures surrounding the deaths.
Then came Mahara Prison in 2020.
Eleven prisoners ultimately died following unrest amid Covid fears and severe overcrowding. Amnesty called for an impartial investigation into the deaths and the use of live ammunition, noting that it was already the third incident that year involving lethal force against prisoners.
Then Negombo.
Different governments.
Different decades.
Different explanations.
Same country.
Same astonishing national talent for becoming surprised by conditions we have spent years refusing to fix.
And look at the numbers
Negombo Prison was designed for roughly 650 people.
When the July violence erupted, it held about 2,400.
Sri Lanka's 22 prisons collectively contained about 41,000 prisoners, nearly four times their designed capacity.
Around 65.5% of the prison population was incarcerated in connection with drug offences.
Now, suddenly, after 28 people die, there is discussion of reopening facilities, creating new capacity, recruiting staff, introducing house arrest for some low-risk offenders and reconsidering aspects of incarceration.
Again:
Good.
Do it.
But we have a strange governing philosophy in this country.
We don't repair roofs when they leak.
We wait for the ceiling to fall on somebody.
Then appoint a committee to study gravity.
This is what selective justice does to a country
The easy interpretation of Welikada 1983 is ethnic.
Tamil prisoners died.
A Sinhala-majority state failed to deliver accountability.
That is plainly part of the history and pretending otherwise is intellectually dishonest.
But there is an even larger lesson.
Selective justice eventually stops being selective.
Because once an institution learns that accountability is optional, it doesn't necessarily remain neatly confined to the minority against whom impunity was first tolerated.
It spreads.
That is the part Sri Lanka ought to understand.
You cannot build a justice system that is defective only on Tuesdays.
You cannot teach police not to investigate these deaths properly and expect investigative excellence everywhere else.
You cannot allow prison accountability to collapse when the victims are politically inconvenient and then act astonished when prison governance deteriorates generally.
Impunity is not a sniper rifle.
It is mould.
It spreads through the building.
And this is where karma comes in
I believe in karma.
But not the cheap version.
Not:
They hurt us, therefore somebody hurt them.
That is not karma.
That is vengeance wearing incense.
The officers killed at Negombo in 2026 did not murder the Tamil prisoners at Welikada in 1983.
The prisoners killed at Negombo did not deserve death because another generation failed to obtain justice.
Children who lost fathers this month do not owe a debt incurred before they were born.
There is no moral ledger on which 28 new corpses somehow compensate for 53 old ones.
No.
Karma is consequence.
Institutional consequence.
National consequence.
You tolerate injustice somewhere and eventually you create a system capable of producing injustice everywhere.
You permit prisons to become invisible spaces.
You tolerate overcrowding.
You tolerate political interference.
You tolerate brutality.
You tolerate unexplained deaths.
You tolerate unanswered questions.
You tolerate investigations that become reports that become shelves that become dust.
Then one morning you wake up and discover that the institution you neglected has become dangerous to everyone inside it.
Tamil prisoner.
Sinhala prisoner.
Muslim prisoner.
Prison guard.
Doesn't matter.
The monster eventually forgets whom it was originally built to eat.
That is karma.
There is another uncomfortable question
Why do some Sri Lankan deaths belong to the entire nation while others apparently belong only to their community?
We know this phenomenon.
A Sinhala officer dies and Tamils are expected to recognise a Sri Lankan tragedy.
Correctly.
A Muslim civilian dies and the country should recognise a Sri Lankan tragedy.
Correctly.
A Tamil civilian dies and too often the conversation immediately becomes conditional.
What was he accused of?
Was he LTTE?
Was he sympathetic?
What happened beforehand?
Were soldiers attacked?
Was there a security situation?
Interesting.
Apparently some Sri Lankans must first pass a character examination before qualifying to have their unlawful death mourned.
That is not justice.
That is tribal bookkeeping.
And Tamils should reject its mirror image too.
A prison officer killed at Negombo is not less deserving of justice because Tamil prisoners were denied it at Welikada.
Quite the opposite.
We should be the people demanding justice for him most loudly.
Because we know what unanswered graves do to families.
Justice cannot be retroactive nationalism
Sri Lanka loves retrospective heroism.
Decades later everybody was against Black July.
Everybody opposed racism.
Everybody believes Welikada was terrible.
Marvelous.
Apparently 1983 Sri Lanka contained no racists whatsoever.
A great mystery who did all the racist things.
This is how nations launder memory.
First comes denial.
Then qualification.
Then silence.
Then, forty years later, everybody agrees it was awful once accountability is biologically impossible.
History becomes safe when the suspects are dead.
So let us make Welikada unsafe again.
Not by inventing facts.
By insisting on the ones already established.
Fifty-three prisoners were killed.
The deaths were judicially determined to be murders.
Most of those killed had not been convicted.
The magistrate ordered further police investigation.
No criminal prosecution followed.
Relatives spent years pursuing civil claims.
The state eventually made ex gratia payments without admitting liability.
Those aren't slogans.
They are the record.
And they constitute an extraordinary failure of justice.
So yes. Investigate Negombo.
Aggressively.
Investigate how drugs apparently circulated inside the institution.
Investigate how a prison built for 650 came to contain roughly 2,400 human beings.
Investigate the deaths of prisoners.
Investigate the deaths of officers.
Investigate allegations concerning transferred inmates.
Investigate the two subsequent deaths in custody.
Investigate why Human Rights Commission officials were initially denied access to Welikada.
Preserve CCTV.
Preserve records.
Interview everybody.
Publish findings.
Prosecute crimes where admissible evidence supports prosecution.
Compensate victims where the state is legally responsible.
Reform the prison system.
Do the whole damn thing.
But while Sri Lanka is rediscovering its passion for justice, could we perhaps enlarge the guest list?
There are fifty-three people waiting.
They have been waiting since 1983.
July 25. July 27.
Maybe those dates should become national days of conscience.
Not Tamil days.
Sri Lankan days.
Because Welikada is not ultimately an accusation against Sinhalese people.
It is an accusation against impunity.
There were also prison officials who reportedly tried to protect Tamil inmates during the massacre; later accounts have specifically remembered those who behaved courageously while others failed them.
That matters too.
Because history's dividing line is rarely as simple as Tamil and Sinhala.
Sometimes it is between people who recognise another human being and people who don't.
Between officials who understand their duty and officials who abandon it.
Between governments interested in truth and governments interested in surviving the news cycle.
Between justice and convenience.
That is the line worth drawing.
Forty-three years ago, 53 Tamil prisoners died behind Sri Lankan prison walls.
Today Sri Lanka is again asking what happens when people die behind Sri Lankan prison walls.
Perhaps this time we should answer properly.
For the eight officers who died at Negombo.
For the twenty prisoners.
For those allegedly mistreated afterwards.
For the victims of Mahara.
For the dead of Welikada in 2012.
And yes—
For Kuttimany.
For Thangathurai.
For Nadesathasan.
For Jegan.
For Sivarasa.
For Sivan Anpalagan.
For Balasubramaniam.
For Suresh Kumar.
For Arunthavarajah.
For Thanabalasingham.
For Arafat.
For P. Mahendran.
For K. Thillainathan.
For S. Kularajesekaran.
For Uthaya Kumar.
For S. Sivakumar.
For A. Rajan.
For S. Balachandran.
For Yogachandran Kili.
For S. Subramaniam.
For Mylvaganam Sinniah.
For G. Mylvaganam.
For C. Sivanantharajah.
For T. Kandiah.
For S. Sathiyaseelan.
For Kathiravetpillai.
For Easvaranathan.
For K. Nagarajah.
For Gunapalan Ganeshalingham.
For Anbalagan Sundaram.
For Ramalingham Balachandran.
For K. Thavarajasingham.
For K. Krishnakumar.
For R. Yoganathan.
For A. Uthayakumar.
For Muthukumar Sri Kumar.
For Amirthanayagam Philip.
For Kulasingham Kumar.
For Selachami Kumar.
For Kandasamy Sarwesvaran.
For A. Mariampillai.
For Sivapatham Neethirajah.
For Devanayagam Paskaran.
For Ponniah Thurairajah.
For Gnanamuthu Navaretnasingham.
For Kandiah Rajendran.
For Dr. Somasundaram Rajasundaram.
For Somasundaram Manoranjan.
For Arumugam Seyan.
For Thamotherampillai Jegamohanandan.
For Sinnathamby Sivasubramaniam.
For Selliah Rajaratnam.
For Kumarasamy Ganeshalingham.
All fifty-three.
And for the people dying now.
Not because one group matters more.
Because none of them matters less.
That is what equal justice means.
Not justice for my dead.
Not justice for your dead.
Not justice when television cameras are outside the gate.
Not justice when the dead wore uniforms.
Not justice when the government likes the victims.
Not justice when history has finally made justice politically inexpensive.
Justice for all of them.
Otherwise stop calling the bloody thing justice.
Call it what it is.
Selection.
Selected sources
· Amnesty International, Sri Lanka: Deliberate killings, disappearances and torture (1994): https://www.amnesty.org/zh-hant/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/ASA370151994ENGLISH.pdf
· UNHCR Refworld copy of Amnesty International country report (1994): https://www.refworld.org/reference/countryrep/amnesty/1994/96423
· M. Nithyanandan, Tamil Prisoners Massacre 1983 Revisited: https://sangam.org/tamil-prisoners-massacre-1983-revisited-by-m-nithyanandan/
· Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, access denial at Welikada Prison (2026): https://www.hrcsl.lk/hrcsl-meets-welikada-prison-officials-over-access-denial/
· Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, investigation into Negombo Prison violence and subsequent events (2026): https://www.hrcsl.lk/statement-on-investigation-into-violence-at-negombo-prison-and-subsequent-events-at-other-prisons/?lang=ta
· Reuters, Sri Lanka moves to address prison overcrowding after riot kills 28 (10 July 2026): https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/sri-lanka-moves-address-prison-overcrowding-after-riot-kills-28-2026-07-10/
· Reuters, Drug smuggling caused deadly Sri Lanka prison riot, says minister (7 July 2026): https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/drug-smuggling-caused-deadly-sri-lanka-prison-riot-says-minister-2026-07-07/
· Human Rights Watch, Sri Lanka: Death Sentence for Prison Official (2022): https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/01/17/sri-lanka-death-sentence-prison-official
· Amnesty International, Sri Lanka: Prison deaths must be investigated amid growing COVID-19 unrest (2020): https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/11/sri-lanka-prison-deaths-must-be-investigated-amid-growing-covid19-unrest-2/
· Daily FT, historical account of the Welikada killings: https://www.ft.lk/Opinion-and-Issues/The-ghastly-tale-of-the-killing-of-Tamil-prisoners-at-Welikada-in-1983/44-720871
