Chronology Of Ltte Terror - Part 13

From the Daily News Archives:

Inhuman slaughter of villagers by LTTE

Wijitha Nakkawita

The people of remote village Maha Divulvewa a small farming village in the Trincomalee District were in deep sleep. It was well past midnight on Sunday May 25, 1986, when the villagers were suddenly awakened by unfamiliar noises.

Guns

Little Nilanthi and eight year old school girl was also woken up but just then she saw two men enter the bedroom of her house and point their guns at her mother who was breast feeding her little brother.

Two shots were fired the mother and the infant fell in a pool of blood. Nilanthi begged of one of the men who was pointing the gun at her chest not to shoot her and he took the gun awy but the other man while leaving fired a shot that hit Nilanthi on her arm.

Dark

She crept out of the house it was still dark though the dawn would break in another half hour or so. By the time the terrorists had completed their devilish job 26 villagers were dead, among them women and children. Two people including Nilanthi escaped death miraculously.

When the Tiger terrorists entered the village they set fire to 20 houses and five people burnt inside the houses. The people were harassed and tortured mentally before they were finally gunned down by the terrorists who demonstrated they had had descended to the lowest depths of perversity and ruthlessness only moral bankruptcy could have brought about.

The terrorists like during the Kent and Dollar farm massacres ordered the villagers to come out of the houses and line up.

Execution

Next they asked them to kneel and pointed their guns at them – in a mock execution. Now the terrorists ordered the kneeling villagers to stand up and marched them along a village path and again they were asked to kneel down. The inhuman terrorists repeated this mental torture on the villages many times before they were gunned down in cold blood.

Among some of the unfortunate victims were some people in the vicinity of the village who had seen houses ablaze in the night and had come t help to put out the flames.

The year 1986 was to see more and more killings of civilians yet the terrorists always showed they were cowards. They always chose the night to hide in darkness so that they could not be seen.

They chose most remote villages or isolated places with the most helpless people – always the unarmed – to attack and children, pregnant women, the old and the feeble were simply killed either hacked to death or shot.

Hunters

The terrorists did not spare even infants like the suckling brother of Nilanthi who was shot while feeding at the breast of his mother in a country a tradition that hunters still practice when a deer or any wild animal is not killed if it was feeding, but killing an infant sucking the breast of his mother, only the Tiger terrorists had done in this country.

On the same day at Viduthalathivu, Mannar the body of a senior citizen, a village leader and a former chairman of the village committee Augustine Rajendram who was 87 years was killed and his body was found tied to a pillar box.

A few days before he was killed some young men – the terrorists were called ‘our boys’ or simply ‘the boys’ by most sympathizers of the terrorists of the north and east – and in this case young men who had taken Rajendram away were the boys.

Terrorists

There was explanation why he was killed after detaining him for so many days. Like Sinhalese villagers that were being killed by the scores by the various terrorist groups they were also killing Tamil civilians or law officers one by one but but the pattern followed by the terrorists was always the method of cowards as the terrorists of all brands of Tigers including their bosses were nothing but cowards who feared the strong and the armed choosing to kill only the unarmed and feeble like an 87 year village elder.

“Terrorists made us kneel and opened fire”

Brian Williams

Tamil terrorists massacred 20 Sinhalese villagers, including 10 children, in an upsurge of separatist violence in eastern Sri Lanka.

The killings, including the gruesome murder of 10 people made to kneel under a sign saying ‘stop’ hit the island on the country’s two holiest days when the majority Sinhalese celebrate the Buddhist festival Vesak.

Since the festival started on Friday morning, separatist rebels have killed 32 people in a series of raids on Sinhalese villages in Trincomalee district in eastern Sri Lanka.

Defence Secretary general Sepala Attygale said the attacks were intended to drive Sinhalese out of a region which the rebels want included in a Tamil nation stretching south from the Jaffna peninsula to include one quarter of the country.

In the worst incident, rebels swept through Siripura village late last night killing four women, six men and 10 children aged from nine months to 14 years.

‘Massacre is the only word to describe what happened in Siripura,’ Attygale told reporters. He said 15 to 20 terrorists attacked the village, 30 miles (50 km) west of the main east coast town of Trincomalee, from three directions.

They set 25 houses ablaze and left five victims inside to b urn.

The 10 people executed included six members of one family who were made to kneel at three locations before they were shot from behind at the site of a irrigation ditch.

Fourteen-year-old J. D. Chandrasiri, who survived by pretending to be dead among the huddle of bodies, described the killing in which his sister, brother-in-law and their four children died.

He said two terrorists broke into their four-room mud house on the outskirts of the village at around midnight.

The occupants were made to kneel in a mock-education at the house and them marched 30 yards across the irrigation ditch to a dirt road leading to the village. A second mock execution was carried out and the group were again marched 100 yards down the road to an unmanned militia checkpoint marked by a sign saying ‘stop’. Four more villagers were brought along by other terrorists.

“We were made to kneel again and this time the men opened fire,” Chandrasiri said. “As soon as I heard the sound I fell flat on my stomach and pretended to be dead.”

He said the execution was carried out by two terrorists who fired on the group as they knelt with their heads bowed. The men shot from the other side of the dirt road.

“After the shooting the two men moved down the line lifting our heads. I went limp and after they left ran away,” he said.

Another young survivor was 10-year-old Indra Kumari who was asleep with her grand-mother in the house of her aunt and uncle.

‘Grandma heard a noise outside and peeped through a window, there was a loud sound and she fell back clutching her chest,” Indra said.

“Then one man kicked down the door and shot auntie and uncle. There were lots of shots. I don’t think he saw me.”

The man left the house after tossing a blazing torch into the room, she said. She then ran from the house and hid in nearby scrub for about two hours.

Twelve hours after the attack, several residents of the 1,000 population village headed with their belongings down the dirt road and past the executed bodies to relatives in villages 30 miles (50 km) away.

Carrying only a small suitcase and with his wife beside him clutching a nine-month-old baby, W. B. Jayasekera, 24, said: “We are scared. I’m worried about my children.”

Attygale said the killing was the most gruesome sight he had seen in 40 years as a soldier.

“Any soldier would be revolted by this. They were children and humble ordinary people,” he said. “I told the troops to get the bodies out of sight as soon as the inquest was over.” He said the attacks in the Trincomalee district, which started last Wednesday with the first raid on a Sinhalese village and sabotage of a part-Japanese-owned cement factory, marked the worst violence to his the region.

He said as well as wanting to drive Sinhalese out of the region the terrorists were possibly switching their attacks to the east to divert troops from their operation on the Jaffna peninsula, stronghold of the separatists.

The Jaffna citizens committee, a group of prominent doctors, lawyers and other leading figures, said in a statement they had appealed to Jayewardena to call off an operation to restore government control over the area.

The statement said about 90 people had been killed in the week since the army began to expand the perimeters around its bases and reopen roads.

The government has said 33 terrorists, two soldiers and one civilian were killed in the operation.

The statement said villages had been bombed and strafed and movement curtailed in the region including islands off the coast.

TRINCOMALEE, Sri Lanka Sunday (Reuter)

Midnight massacre of 20 villagers

Fifteen women and children were among twenty people brutally gunned down at Mahadivulwewa, in the Trincomalee district, early yesterday morning a military spokesman said yesterday.

“There were five men, seven women and eight children among the victims. Two other women with gunshot injuries who survived the attack, were flown to Colombo for urgent medical attention”, the spokesman from the Joint Operations Command (JOC) said.

Ruthless Attack

The attack was similar in its ruthlessness to the Anuradhapura massacre a year ago, the Kent and Dollar farm shootings and the carnage in the fishing villages of Kokilai and Nayaru, the spokesman said.

The Joint Operations Command in Colombo said the villagers were asleep when the terrorists crept up on them.

Their houses were first set ablaze and they were mowed down by automatic fire as the inmates rushed out. Other victims included neighbours who unsuspectingly rushed up to help out out the blaze, a JOC spokesman said.

Separatist terrorists

The killings by the separatist terrorists in this sector during the last two days have risen to 32. Trincomalee’s co-ordinating officers, Brigadier Harsha Gunaratne, said the campaign of terror was obviously aimed at frightening away Sinhalese who wished to return to their homes in the district. Two survivors from the massacre, both women,were flown in to the General Hospital, Colombo, yesterday. One had a gunshot injury in the chest and the other a shattered elbow.

Mahadiwulwewa attack

A few hours before the Mahadiwulwewa attack terrorists had struck a hamlet named Gomarankadawela in the same area, killing seven. Other attacks at Seruwila, Kallar and Kalkudah, within the same few hours, brought the death toll to 32.

Military sources in Colombo said that the attacks in the Eastern Province may also have been motivated by a strategical consideration - to divert attention of the security forces from the Jaffna peninsula where a troop turn around exercise and route clearance operation had just been completed.

The JOC said both operations had been carried out successfully. Thirty terrorists, two soldiers and a civilian were killed.

Terrorists provocations

The operation took six days to complete and ended on Friday, after which there had been a marked decrease in the number of terrorists provocations in the peninsula, officials said.

The main purpose of securing security bases, cutting off terrorist pockets and clearing the main roads of landmined had been achieved to a great extent, officials said.

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Tomorrow - LTTE terror attack at Cold Stores

Yesterday - LTTE killers blast CTO

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