JAFFNA, Sri Lanka — The mayor of Jaffna on Sunday denied that the city council or her party had any part in the police removal of a bust of Thileepan, a Tamil Tiger political leader, and said the council had refused repeated police demands for a written promise that the memorial would be taken down.
"We strongly condemn the removal," Mayor Mathivathani Vivekanandarajah told reporters at the Jaffna Municipal Council. "Neither the Municipal Council nor the leadership of our party was responsible for its removal."
Her statement was a direct response to accusations from the Tamil National People's Front, which organized the 12 days of commemorations at Nallur where the bust stood. Selvarajah Kajendren, the party's general secretary, has accused the mayor's party, the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi, of acting as an agent of the police and of colluding with the government of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Police removed the bust before dawn on Sunday, a day after the commemorations ended.
Thileepan, whose birth name was Rasaiah Parthipan, was a senior political figure in the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which remains banned in Sri Lanka. He died in 1987 after refusing food and water for 12 days, and is widely commemorated among Tamils in the north.
Ms. Vivekanandarajah said the request to install the bust was presented at the council's monthly meeting on Sept. 15, the day the commemorations began. Because it sought only temporary permission, she said, she consulted C.V.K. Sivagnanam, the ITAK's acting leader, who told her the council could approve it and advised her not to send the bust back from the site, where it had already been brought.
The council then took up the proposal. Members of one party walked out, she said, and the remaining members voted unanimously to allow the bust to stay until Sept. 26.
The decision drew police attention almost immediately, the mayor said. The officer in charge of the Jaffna police station repeatedly asked how the council had authorized the installation, she said, and later requested written details of who had made the application and how it had been approved.
Police also asked the council to obtain a written undertaking from the organizers that the bust would be removed after Sept. 26, she said, and officers pressed for that assurance in repeated phone calls. The council did not provide it.
"Although the police sought a written undertaking that the statue would be removed, we did not allow ourselves to be compelled into providing such an undertaking," she said.
The police did not respond to a request for comment on her account.
She also rejected Mr. Kajendren's account of a conversation in which, he said, Mr. Sivagnanam had asked him, "Whom did you ask before placing this statue here?" and threatened to remove it himself if it remained after Sept. 26.
Mr. Sivagnanam "did not oppose the placement of the statue," the mayor said. "Therefore, the allegations against him are unfounded."
Mr. Sivagnanam has not commented publicly on the dispute.
Ms. Vivekanandarajah said she had attended the commemoration and paid tribute to Thileepan herself, and that council members had also marked his death during their monthly meeting.
"We, too, condemn the removal of Thileepan's statue," she said.
