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# No Excavation After a Year: Mandaitivu Mass Grave Inquiry Delayed Again
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/no-excavation-after-a-year-mandaitivu-mass-grave-inquiry-delayed-again/
- Published: 2026-09-22T14:19:25.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T14:19:25.000Z
- Author: Our Reporter
- Tags: September 2026

**JAFFNA, Sri Lanka-** A magistrate in northern Sri Lanka on Tuesday gave the police more time to investigate an alleged mass grave on Mandaitivu, an island off the Jaffna Peninsula where dozens of young Tamil men disappeared after being detained by the army in 1990\. The case has been before the courts for a year without an excavation.

Magistrate Aneeba Rajeev of the Kayts Magistrate’s Court adjourned the case until Nov. 10 after officers from the Jaffna District Crime Prevention Police said they needed more time to gather evidence and record witness statements. The officers presented the material they had collected so far.

At the previous hearing, on July 28, the court directed investigators to examine and submit documents and testimony, including evidence on the location where the killings and burials are alleged to have taken place.

The case began with a complaint lodged at the Kayts police station on Sept. 4, 2025, by Stephan Marilda, 81, who says her son was among those taken, and Swaminathan Prahalathan, a member of the Velanai Pradeshiya Sabha, the local council, and president of the Islands Development Association. The complainants have asked that wells on the island be excavated, on the basis of accounts that the bodies of those killed were thrown into them and sealed. The case first came before the Kayts court on Sept. 17, 2025.

At a hearing in December, the police submitted a signed preliminary report based on interviews with residents, relatives of the missing, and navy and army personnel, along with findings about the wells where the bodies are said to lie. The magistrate ordered a typed copy, which was filed the same day.

Sebamalaimuthu Krishnabelina appeared for the complainants on Tuesday. Poorni Marianayagam, a lawyer for the Office on Missing Persons, a state body set up to trace people who disappeared during the conflict, attended with T. Selvakumar, the office’s regional coordinator. Mr. Prahalathan was also present.

No excavation or forensic examination has been carried out, and nothing presented in court on Tuesday established that the site contains human remains.

## **The 1990 disappearances**

The allegations concern events in the neighboring villages of Mandaitivu, Allaipiddy and Mankumban, across the lagoon from the Dutch fort in Jaffna, during an army offensive in the islands in August and September 1990\. At the time, the army was fighting to relieve its garrison in the fort, which the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had besieged.

According to a 2005 report by the North-East Secretariat on Human Rights, a rights body set up in areas then controlled by the Tamil Tigers, soldiers detained hundreds of young men from the three villages between Aug. 23 and Sept. 25, 1990\. Families had sheltered in churches, temples and mosques on the military’s instructions, and the young men were taken from there. Most were released within about 10 days, but at least 70 never returned. The report’s list of names drew on an official list of 70 kept by a local government office. Relatives told the group of additional cases.

Relatives described soldiers entering St. Philip Neri’s Church on Mandaitivu and a school building at dawn, waking the young men and marching them away while mothers who protested were threatened at gunpoint. Many of the missing were teenagers still in school. Others were fishermen, farmers, masons and toddy tappers. One mother said her son kept looking back and calling for her as soldiers led him away.

Several families said they appealed directly to the army commander in the north. They said the troops then withdrew suddenly at the end of September, and their sons were not seen again.

For many residents, the 1990 operation followed an earlier killing. In June 1986, 33 fishermen, 32 of them from Gurunagar in Jaffna and one from Mandaitivu, were killed at sea off the island in an attack that residents and Tamil groups have blamed on the navy.

## **Years of claims, and a first court case**

In 2019, S. Sritharan, a Tamil member of Parliament, told the Office on Missing Persons that more than 100 people who disappeared from the three villages in 1990 might be buried in a mass grave on Mandaitivu.

In 2025, before the complaint was filed, the justice minister, Harshana Nanayakkara, declined to act on the Mandaitivu allegations. He said there had been no police complaint and no court order, and called the claims hearsay. Tamil politicians and relatives criticized the remarks. The complaint that opened the present case was lodged a few months later.

The Mandaitivu case is one of several involving suspected mass graves in the north and east. The most prominent is at Chemmani, on the outskirts of Jaffna, where court-supervised excavations that began in 2025 have recovered human remains.

The Kayts court will take up the Mandaitivu case again on Nov. 10.