Sri Lankan police have asked the occupying Sri Lankan army’s headquarters in Jaffna for records of the military camps that stood beside a suspected mass grave site at Mandaitivu and of the soldiers who served in them, telling the Kayts magistrate’s court on Tuesday that the records had not reached them and that they needed more time.
The court has put the case back to 5 January.
More than 80 young men and women were disappeared on 25 and 26 August 1990 during a military operation in Mandaitivu, Allaipiddy and Mankumban.
Families commemorate the Mandaitivu massacre. File photograph
More than 45 of their bodies are in a well in the second ward at Mandaitivu, with surviving witnesses to confirm it, and further remains are suspected to lie in a well at a school nearby.
A case seeking permission to excavate the site is before the Kayts magistrate’s court, which has ordered the Jaffna district Criminal Investigation Division to examine the evidence, documents and witnesses and submit a detailed report. Further reports were handed in by police when the case was taken up on Tuesday.
Families marked thirty-six years since the massacre in August. Human remains were found at Allaipiddy in 2023, and the search for the disappeared across the North-East has focused this year on the mass grave at Chemmani, where relatives have rejected the excavating archaeologist’s interim report and are demanding an international investigation.
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