In response to “Sri Lanka’s Envoy to India Remembers Lakshman Kadirgamar, 21 Years After His Assassination” (Jaffna Monitor, 13 August 2026, by Aruliniyan Mahalingam)
To the Editor,
I read with great interest your report marking the twenty-first anniversary of Lakshman Kadirgamar’s assassination, and High Commissioner Mahishini Colonne’s moving tribute to the standards he set for a generation of Sri Lankan diplomats. Her recollection of his insistence that “every word has meaning” in diplomacy, and his emphasis on institutions that outlast individuals and political cycles, matches precisely the man I knew through my own dealings with him in those years.
I served alongside Mr. Kadirgamar in several capacities — as a member of the Sri Lanka chapter board of the South Asia Foundation, which he chaired from 2001, and as a participant in Board meetings of the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies (BCIS), held at times at his residence and at times at the BCIS itself, where he served as chairman. I would like to offer a few recollections of my own, both to add texture to the record and, in one case, to pose a question I have long wondered about.
Security and the shadow of threat
Your report is right to note that Mr. Kadirgamar knew, with some precision, that he was a marked man. I can add a small corroborating detail: I recall that he was given, in writing, the specific nature of the threats made against him by the LTTE, and that he moved under what I understood to be roughly three layers of high security. The BCIS Board meetings held at the Centre itself, which I attended, were preceded by sniffer-dog searches.
On one occasion, I received a telephone call — evidently from the LTTE — inquiring after his presence in Kandy at the Development Forum. That same call made a point of referencing my own attendance at meetings at his house, which understandably alarmed me. Fearing that my car might be targeted, I took the precaution of keeping the Secretary of Defence informed of my telephone numbers, my vehicle registration, and the regular routes I took, in the hope of some screening and protection. I mention this not to dwell on my own circumstances, but because it illustrates how far the shadow of threat against him extended — to those simply meeting with him on institutional business.
Two anecdotes worth preserving
President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga was, as many will recall, notorious for arriving late to meetings — so notorious that her dog arriving ahead of her became a known signal in itself. When the dog arrived, that was LK’s own cue to set off for the cabinet meeting. On one occasion the dog had already arrived, and cabinet had risen to receive the President, only for her to be nowhere in sight — one of those occasions when she came a good deal later still.
On a more serious note, it was said that CBK had wanted to appoint LK as Prime Minister, an ambition bitterly opposed by the man who went on to hold that office himself. I do not recall with certainty how the difficulty was conveyed to LK, it is possible Anura Bandaranaike carried the message on her behalf, but I recall clearly that LK felt she ought to have told him so directly, rather than through an intermediary.
The man himself
Away from the security apparatus, what I remember most is the sheer volume of his reading. I recall a bag full of his books being checked in at Geneva airport on one occasion, and, on another, seeing his hotel room littered with books — a habit entirely consistent with a man who, as your report notes, was still working on an academic journal on the very evening he was killed. Indeed, his last public act that evening was at the BCIS itself: he presided over the ceremony launching the inaugural issue of the Centre’s academic journal, International Relations in a Globalizing World, only shortly before he was shot, with the Indian High Commissioner, Nirupama Rao, present alongside him.
I also recall a call with him lasting some thirty to forty-five minutes on the subject of an appointment he was making of a head of mission to another country — a reminder of how personally he approached even routine institutional decisions, weighing character and fit rather than simply signing off on a name.
His years at Oxford, long before any of this, left their own mark on him. He read for a Bachelor of Letters at Balliol College in the late 1950s, and was elected President of the Oxford Union in 1958–59 — only the second Sri Lankan to hold that office. The college and the Union stayed with him for the rest of his life: his portrait was unveiled at the Oxford Union on 18 March 2005, by Lord Chris Patten, then Chancellor of the University, in a ceremony that made him the fifteenth Union office-bearer to be so honoured in the Union’s history. That was less than five months before he was killed. It is a detail I think of often — how much of the institutional, unhurried seriousness he brought to Colombo and to Geneva had its roots in that earlier, very different institution.
Geneva, and the scale of the response
I recall Mr. Kadirgamar chairing a standing-room-only meeting of partners in Geneva, organised by the Foreign Ministry and held at IFRC headquarters, convened specifically because of the scale of the humanitarian outpouring of support toward Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami. I had recommended such a meeting in a memo at the time, and its scale — every seat and much of the standing room taken — remains, for me, one of the clearest measures of how the world responded to Sri Lanka in that period.
A contemporaneous account of that Geneva meeting survives in the press. A Daily News report from London, filed by Rodney Martinesz on 17 March 2005, records Mr. Kadirgamar meeting the IFRC in Geneva that week and calling on donor agencies to set up a “maintenance fund” so that tsunami reconstruction work would not fall apart for want of funds later on — a proposal made against the backdrop of the IFRC’s own US$340 million Draft Action Plan for post-tsunami Sri Lanka. The same report has him raising, separately, the LTTE’s acquisition of air capability with the British Foreign Secretary, and thanking the UK for absorbing ten per cent of Sri Lanka’s multilateral debt commitments for a decade — a reminder that even in the middle of a humanitarian crisis, he never let the political and security dimensions of his brief out of sight. (https://archives.dailynews.lk/2005/03/17/news03.htm)
A question for the record
Your report’s investigation into the men and woman behind the assassination — Sempiyan, Veerathevan, and Manimekalai — is a significant piece of reporting, and I read it with the attention the subject deserves. It brought to mind something I have not seen fully resolved in print: I recall a suspect, a man of humble means who I believe cut trees for a living, who was framed and imprisoned in connection with the case and who died before the matter was ever resolved in court.
The public record I have been able to trace shows a gardener, Muttiah Sahadevan, and a three-wheeler driver, Isitor Arokyanadan, held as the last two named defendants after the original four — Prabhakaran, Pottu Amman, Charles, and Komadi Mani Mekala — were confirmed dead in 2010. Arokyanadan was eventually acquitted in 2018 after thirteen years in detention.
If any of your readers, or your reporting team, can identify this man — whether he is the same person who died in 2019, or a further case altogether — I would be grateful to see the record completed. Whatever the outcome of the investigations into who ordered Mr. Kadirgamar’s killing, the fate of the ordinary men swept up and held for over a decade under the Prevention of Terrorism Act deserves to be as clearly documented as the fate of those who planned it.
Yours faithfully,
Jeevan Thiagarajah
