COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — A three-judge bench of the Colombo High Court ruled on Friday that a witness who has twice changed his account in the case of the abducted journalist Prageeth Eknaligoda may be recalled to testify again, after he told the court that the evidence he gave four years ago had been extracted from him under duress.
The witness, Sumathipala Sureshkumar, known in the case papers as Thaveendran and, more commonly, as Murali, is the fourth prosecution witness in a trial-at-bar against nine members of Sri Lanka's Army Intelligence Unit. The bench, comprising Judges Nayana Senaviratne, Nalin Hewawasam, and Lakmali Hewawasam, said the date for recording his fresh testimony would be fixed after the court vacation. Further proceedings were put off to Aug. 7.
The order is a narrow procedural one, but it goes to the centre of a case that has come to stand for the durability of impunity in Sri Lanka. Eknaligoda, a columnist and cartoonist for the news website Lanka eNews, was last seen on Jan. 24, 2010, two days before the presidential election in which he had been a critic of the incumbent, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Sixteen years on, no body has been recovered, and no one has been convicted.
Murali gave confessional statements to the Criminal Investigation Department and to the Homagama Magistrate's Court during the investigation. When he entered the witness box before the trial-at-bar in June 2022, his evidence departed from those statements, and the Attorney General's Department informed the court that it proposed to treat him as hostile.
After the change of government in September 2024, Murali filed an application through Senior Counsel K. S. Rathnavel,, stating that his 2022 testimony had been given under pressure and requesting permission to present what he called his true evidence. The Attorney General's Department supported the application. Deputy Solicitor General Wasantha Perera told the court in June that the witness had given conflicting accounts because of threats and pressure attributed to the first accused, retired Brigadier Shammi Kumararatne, the former commanding officer of the Giritale army camp.
Counsel for the nine accused objected strongly. The defence argued that the witness was biased, and told the court that a separate prosecution over the alleged intimidation of the witness was still pending before the Trincomalee Magistrate's Court without any final determination. That prosecution arose in June last year, when Kumararatne was arrested on a charge of intimidating a key witness and remanded by the Trincomalee court.
The Giritale camp
The Attorney General filed the indictment under the 2015–2019 administration, alleging that the accused conspired to abduct Eknaligoda between Jan. 24 and 27, 2010, and to cause his death. Investigators told the court that after he was taken, Eknaligoda was driven from Battaramulla to the Giritale army camp in the early hours of Jan. 25, and that the presence of all nine accused at Giritale that day was established through mobile telephone tower records obtained from service providers. Murali's significance to the prosecution is that the second accused is alleged to have telephoned him at about 8 p.m. that evening to say he had met Eknaligoda. The C.I.D. said it later confirmed the information with the operators.
The accused are all on bail. They appeared before the newly constituted bench when the trial resumed on May 4, represented by a defence team led by President's Counsel Anuja Premaratne, with President's Counsel Upul Kumarapperuma appearing for the aggrieved party.
A trial that keeps stopping
The recall order comes after a year in which the case barely moved. Proceedings were suspended for months after Justice Namal Balalle was suspended pending a disciplinary inquiry and Justice Mahen Weeraman retired, leaving the bench unable to sit. In October, the court was told that the two vacancies had still not been filled, and the case was put off again. Chief Justice Preethi Padman Surasena eventually appointed the present bench, which ordered in May that the trial sit weekly, on Fridays. The hearings have since been held not at Hulftsdorp but at a court set up in a former ministerial residence on Wijerama Mawatha in Colombo.
Other gaps in the prosecution remain unclosed. In November 2022, counsel for the aggrieved party told the court that the failure to summon Shani Abeysekara, the former C.I.D. director who led the original investigation, had seriously weakened the case; the then deputy solicitor general conceded in open court that it was a serious lapse by the department. Abeysekara has since been listed as the 109th witness — a position on the list that, at the trial's current pace, places his evidence years away.
The government that came to office in 2024 promised to resolve the killings and disappearances of journalists. In January, one of the accused in this case, Erantha Peiris, was promoted to the rank of colonel, drawing criticism from human rights organisations. Eknaligoda's wife, Sandya, who has pursued the case for sixteen years, has continued to report threats and abuse.
Whether Murali's second retraction advances the prosecution or further damages it will not be known until he testifies. A witness who has now given two materially different accounts is, for the defence, an argument in itself.
