Colombo: The body of a Sri Lankan newspaper editor, whose assassination under the previous Mahinda Rajapaksa regime in 2009 remains unsolved, was exhumed on Tuesday to aid a new investigation into his murder.
Slain Lasantha Wickrematunge ran the Sunday Leader, which was frequently critical of the government of former president Rajapaksa. The exhumation was conducted by Colombo magistrate Mohamed Mihan in the presence of medico-judicial officers at the Colombo General Cemetery.
The suburban Mount Lavinia court had ordered the exhumation after the Crime Investigation Department (CID) asked for it, claiming that all previous forensic reports were contradictory. “The body was moved to the Judicial Medical Officer's office after exhumation. It will now be examined by a team of doctors,” Athula S. Ranagala, the lawyer of the late editor's family told reporters.
He said the CID had asked for an exhumation due to the contradictory results in previous forensic reports. One of the reports had said that he died of gunshot injuries while another cited stab wounds as the reason of his death.
Lasantha was murdered by unidentified men on a motor way at Attidiya, a Colombo suburb while he was driving to work alone on January 8, 2009, three days after he wrote an editorial saying he believed he would be killed by the government and any inquiry would come to nothing. His murder happened at a time when there were intense restrictions on the media in Sri Lanka.
After winning the 2014 Presidential poll, Maithripala Sirisena vowed to reform Sri Lanka’s treatment of the media and to reopen the probe into Lasantha’s murder. In July, a military intelligence officer became the first person to be arrested in connection with his death. Earlier this month, a judge gave permission for his body to be exhumed, because of conflicting reports from initial autopsies. His grave has been under guard since then.
