JM Exclusive

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — The figure is small and roughly shaped: a human form pressed out of clay, with a round head, a narrow trunk and short limbs, laid on a strip of banana leaf. Beside it, on a woven mat, sits a basket of red flowers. The photograph, released on Wednesday by followers of a Buddhist monk, shows the effigy used in a ceremony held on Tuesday night in Viharamahadevi Park, Colombo’s largest public park. There, exorcists brought from the southern district of Matara performed a Mahaso

In early October, Sweety Akter called her parents in Tangail from a prison in Saudi Arabia. It was one of her monthly calls. She said nothing about a sentence. In one of those last calls, her father later told The Daily Star, she had said she might be released within two months. On Sunday, 11 October, Nazrul Islam made his weekly call to his parents in Brahmanbaria. It lasted two to two and a half minutes. His father says Nazrul told him he was in some trouble. His mother says he gave no sign o

Twenty-six years after journalist Mylvaganam Nimalarajan was murdered in his Jaffna home, Jaffna Monitor reconstructs his final night through his wounded father’s testimony, contemporary newspaper reports, family recollections and the account of the colleague who broadcast his final news report. Shortly before 9:45 p.m. The BBC Tamil Service news ran from 9:15 to 9:45 every night. On Thursday, October 19, 2000, Kanapathipillai Mylvaganam was listening to it from a reclining chair in the livin

By ARULINIYAN MAHALINGAM Saudi Arabia’s Interior Ministry announced on Oct. 14 that it had executed a Bangladeshi man and a woman in the Mecca region after a court convicted them of indecent acts inside a mosque. Bangladesh’s consulate in Jeddah learned of the executions after they had taken place. The day before, Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court had set aside the death sentence of Sivarasa Anojan, a 24-year-old Tamil worker from Kalmunai in eastern Sri Lanka, who was condemned over a Facebook com

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam MIHINTALE, Sri Lanka, Oct. 19 — Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe said on Sunday that the constitutional provision giving Buddhism the foremost place in Sri Lanka originated in an agreement between British colonial authorities and the chiefs of the Kandyan kingdom, and that Sri Lankans had not created it. The documentary record supports the first part of that account. The Kandyan Convention of 1815 did commit the British Crown to protect Buddhism. The words now in

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Between 6:30 and 7 p.m. on Oct. 15, 1986, a fishing trawler carrying about 23 people left the Karaiyoor shore at Gurunagar, on the edge of Jaffna town, for Delft Island, a crossing of a few hours. The boat never reached Delft, and no trace of it or of anyone aboard has been found since. Among the passengers was Visuvalingam Visuvananthathevan, 33, an engineer and Marxist organizer who had founded two small Tamil left-wing movements, the National Lib

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka: A short time before he was killed, Kanapathy Rajadurai, the principal of Jaffna Central College, travelled to Kilinochchi to meet officials of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam about a threat to his life, according to University Teachers for Human Rights (Jaffna), an independent group that documented abuses by all sides in the war. The LTTE resented the government funding that reached the college through Douglas Devananda, then a cabinet minister, leader of the Eelam Peopl