JM Exclusive

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Before Sivarasa Anojan became the Sri Lankan worker at the center of a death-sentence case in Saudi Arabia, his university friends knew him as a fast bowler, an impulsive batsman and a quick-tempered young man who shared his food when money was short. As the case draws appeals for diplomatic intervention and feeds an increasingly charged debate in Sri Lanka, two of those friends have posted public accounts of the man they knew before a Facebook comment led to his prosecutio

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — A Sri Lankan migrant worker sentenced to five years in prison in Saudi Arabia over a Facebook comment deemed insulting to the Prophet Muhammad appealed in hopes of obtaining a lesser punishment. Instead, according to an activist involved in the case, he was sentenced to death. Sivarasa Anojan, a Sri Lankan Tamil working in Saudi Arabia, had also been fined three million Saudi riyals under the original judgment. The death sentence was imposed on Thursday in a decision on his

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam The Supreme Court declared on 10 September that the presidential pardon granted to Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero was null and void. The judgment runs to 58 pages, and its findings reach well beyond the monk who benefited from the pardon. Justice Janak De Silva wrote it. Justices Sobhitha Rajakaruna and Sampath B. Abayakoon agreed. The two petitions were filed in 2019 by the Centre for Policy Alternatives and its executive director, Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, and sepa

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Prison officers went to a temple on Nawala Road in Rajagiriya on Saturday to take Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero back to jail. The monks who were there told them they did not know where he was. Two days earlier, the Supreme Court had struck down the presidential pardon that released him from Welikada Prison in May 2019, holding that the clemency power had been exercised arbitrarily, in breach of the public trust and beyond the president’s authority. Gnanasara Thero had se

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — More than two weeks after floods and landslides tore through the Himalayan border region between Nepal and Tibet, relatives of a Sydney family with roots in Jaffna say they have had no word from any of its four members and are beginning to accept that they may not have survived. Chandrasekaran Muralitharan, 47, his wife, Shylaja Muralitharan, 42, and their sons, Ashwin, 14, and Aarush, 11, were traveling to Mount Kailash in Tibet, one of the holiest sites in Hinduism, when t