October 2026

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — The knife used to kill Anne Laksha Ignatius, the 31-year-old culinary and hospitality instructor stabbed inside her family home in Nallur on Monday, was a professional meat-cutting knife taken from the kitchen of the Jaffna hotel where her suspected killer worked, people familiar with the investigation said. The suspect, Thevathas Pugalarasan, worked at NorthGate, the hotel on Station Road near the Jaffna railway station. The knife was used for cutting meat in the hotel's ki

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — Nineteen years after Sahathevan Nilakshan, a 22-year-old journalism student and magazine editor, was shot dead at his family's home during a military curfew, the University of Jaffna on Wednesday awarded a gold medal bearing his name to the top student in its Media Studies program. The Sahathevan Nilakshan Memorial Gold Medal went to Thanushka Sanjeewa, a graduate from Trincomalee who finished first in her batch. It was presented on Oct. 7, the second day of the university's

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka's government on Tuesday introduced legislation to repeal the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the 47-year-old security law that Tamils, Muslims and critics of successive governments have long associated with arbitrary detention and torture. Human rights groups, lawyers and the country's own Human Rights Commission say the replacement keeps many of the old law's worst features and adds new ones. The bill sets out a broad definition of terroris