We are still searching - The thirty-year cover-up at Chemmani

Thirty years after the Chemmani mass grave first came to light, with over 400 sets of skeletal remains now identified at the site and not a single commander held criminally accountable, a new report from the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) sets out in forensic detail how the Sri Lankan state has spent three decades obstructing the truth about what its army did on the salt flats outside Jaffna.

The report, "Chemmani Mass Grave: We Are Still Searching", published this month, takes its title from the words with which the families of the disappeared close their statements. "We are still searching, is how the statements of the families typically end," it observes. "It has been thirty years of waiting for a body to mourn, let alone justice."

Chemmani, the ITJP argues, is one among countless mass graves that dot the island, but it stands out "for the sheer scale of the cover up of crimes committed by the Sri Lankan military during the civil war". What is most astonishing, the report notes, is that the army continued to use the site as a dumping ground for bodies even after an initial excavation. "Nothing speaks to the level of impunity more than this."

The summer of 1996

The crimes at the heart of the grave belong to a few months in 1996, after the army retook Jaffna and, following the killing of the town commandant Brigadier Ananda Hamangoda by a suicide bomber that July, turned on the civilian population. Amnesty International recorded that roughly 600 people were reported disappeared in the space of a few short months, adding that "it is now feared that nearly all of those who remain disappeared after their arrest by the security forces or a year ago died under torture or were deliberately killed in detention".

The report reconstructs those months through affidavits sworn by families in 2025, and the pattern that emerges is one of arbitrary seizure and total erasure. A shop assistant arrested off the road and never heard of again. A tailor taken at a junction in front of bystanders. A cashier who refused to hand over his employers groceries to soldiers at a checkpoint, arrested and disappeared, his family told simply that "he could not be found". A nineteen-year-old baker working at midnight, beaten alongside four others when the military came in and "beat everyone", then singled out by a masked informant, severely beaten "and dragged away". A schoolboy of eighteen, called out of a birthday party by soldiers of the 512 Brigade. Thirty years later, his family record that there is "no information about him has been found to this day".

On 19 July 1996, the day after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam overran the Mullaitivu army camp, the military threw a cordon around at least seven villages near Navatkuli. Hundreds were made to file past masked informants. Some 150 people were taken to the Subramaniam rice mill, where families gathered outside and, as one affidavit describes, "The soldiers were focused on driving us away". Twenty-four of those detained never came back. The officer commanding the nearby Navatkuli camp, Captain Duminda Keppetiwalana, would later tell an inquiry that as military public relations officer he had made himself "very much popular among the people", handing out Coca Cola, and that his name was tricky, so "I used to tell I am Duminda". His name recurs, again and again, through the affidavits of the disappeared.

It was in the middle of this that Krishanthy Kumaraswamy, an eighteen-year-old schoolgirl, was stopped at the Chemmani checkpoint on 7 September 1996 while cycling home from a Chemistry examination. She was raped and murdered. Her mother Rasamma, a schoolteacher, her sixteen-year-old brother Pranavan and a neighbour, Siddambaram Kirubamoorthi, went to the checkpoint to find her and were killed and buried behind it. The report notes the chain of silencing that followed: the irrigation worker who told Krishanthys mother of the abduction was himself arrested and disappeared, and so, "for safe measure", was the man who witnessed his arrest.

What the perpetrators said

The 1998 trial that convicted five men over Krishanthys murder produced something almost unheard of in Sri Lanka: candid perpetrator testimony. Under the oversight of the Human Rights Commission, Lance Corporal Somaratne Rajapakse and others recorded voluntary statements describing what had been done at Chemmani, and by whom.

Rajapakse told the court that up to 400 bodies had been illegally buried in the area, saying that almost every evening corpses were delivered and soldiers disposed of them. In his statements he was explicit about the system: "The suspects taken into custody at this Chemmani Check Point were either taken to the main Camp and killed, or killed at the Chemmani Check Point." He put the number he had personally seen buried at "about 250 dead bodies", noting that "Those who were thus killed were buried in the area opposite the Chemmani Check Point", and that "Such burials were done by me and the other officers working with me". Bodies were dumped in former LTTE bunkers, or dropped into deep wells that were then filled with earth.

Lance Corporal Dissanayake Jayatilake, convicted alongside him, estimated the dead at around 300 and said they had been "sent there by the 7th Light Infantry". Of the corpses he buried by torchlight after curfew, he recorded that "On most occasions I could see injuries and scars all over such bodies". Probationary Private Suranjith Perera put his own count at "about 40 or 50 bodies", and said that while in service he "had seen people being murdered".

Crucially, these low-ranking soldiers named their superiors. Captain Lalith Hewa, Lieutenant Tudugala, Lieutenant Udayakumara, Captain Sachindra Wijesiriwardena, Captain Shashika Perera, Major Amal Karunasekara and Brigadier Gamini Jayasundara appear throughout the statements as the officers who ordered the detentions, ran the intelligence units and oversaw the killings. Jayatilake, in a second statement, was blunt: "Lieutenant Tudugala is the person responsible for the offence for which I have been convicted."

The men who spoke paid for it. Rajapakse was beaten unconscious by a guard who wanted him to sign a letter recanting. He told the Human Rights Commission "I live in fear of my life" and that "prison officers abuse me". A note sent to his wife, signed "Some members of the Army", warned that if he travelled back to Chemmani to identify graves his family "should get ready to pay a big price by sacrificing the lives", because such a trip would cast "big stigma" on the government and army and be a "big booster" for the LTTE. The five convicted men, refusing state protection, said flatly: "We reject protection by the Police and the Army."

The first excavation, and the first burial of the truth

The 1999 dig, now known as Chemmani 1, was hedged and hobbled from the start. It ran for weeks rather than the "dramatically widened" scope the magistrate had sought, and yielded fifteen complete skeletons from eight burial sites: a young adolescent boy, one woman, and thirteen men. Twelve showed signs of fatal injuries, predominantly blows to the head and chest consistent with being clubbed to death. Several had their hands tied behind their backs; several were found in blindfolds, "strongly implying execution". Two were identified as the garage mechanics Rasaiah Satheeskumar, 28, and Mahenthiran Uthaskaran, 23, taken from their workplace in Ariyalai in August 1996.

Then came the paperwork. On 30 November 1999, the Secretary of the Ministry of Defence issued letters of regret to 355 families, declaring it had proved impossible to trace their relatives and implying that receipt of such a letter meant the case was closed. Two of those letters went to the families of Satheeskumar and Uthaskaran, whose bodies had just been dug out of Chemmani. The Missing Persons Guardian Association denounced an investigation that must have been "perfunctory, utterly inefficient and ridiculous". On 5 December, 250 parents and relatives began a hunger strike.

Four senior officers were arrested in 2000 and almost immediately bailed. For a year, no funds were made available to send forensic samples abroad, in defiance of the magistrates order. The cases were moved to Colombo on the grounds that soldiers feared for their lives in Jaffna, which meant Tamil applicants and witnesses could hardly travel to attend. Respondents simply failed to appear when summoned. By 2004, their lawyers were declining to appear on the grounds that they had not been properly briefed. As the report notes with grim economy, "In their absence, it was ironically the complainants who found themselves being challenged in court."

Promoted, not prosecuted

The reports second annexe is perhaps its most damning section. It tracks the subsequent careers of seven officers named in the perpetrator statements, and the pattern is uniform. Amal Karunasekara, whom Rajapakse identified as running the intelligence unit at the Ariyalai camp that fed corpses to Captain Lalith Hewa for disposal, went on to command Sri Lankas peacekeeping contingent in Haiti, a deployment during which a UN investigation found that Sri Lankan peacekeepers "organised and committed systematic acts of sexual exploitation and abuse". He rose to Director of Military Intelligence, then Chief of Staff of the army, retiring as a Major General and becoming Commandant of the National Defence College. He was arrested in 2018 in connection with the abduction and torture of the journalist Keith Noyahr.

Gamini Jayasundara, who Rajapakse said personally instituted the aggressive intelligence regime in Jaffna from July 1996, commanded the 51st Division when the Tamil journalist Mylvaganam Nimalarajan was assassinated in October 2000. He rose to Major General and, after retirement, to General Manager of a state-owned security firm. Duminda Keppetiwalana, first respondent in multiple habeas corpus applications over the Navatkuli disappearances, became Deputy Chief Military Personnel Officer at the UN mission in Haiti and retired a Major General. In 2007, the US Embassy in Colombo recorded that he had been denied US-funded training because of the pending cases, the Ambassador writing that "If the 1996 case is quashed, it will be an indication that Sri Lanka is making little headway on accountability."

Shashika Perera, whom Jayatilake said oversaw killings and ran a burial place by his base camp, went on to command the 59th, 64th and 52nd Divisions, retiring as a Major General only last year. Sachindra Wijesiriwardena, accused by two of the convicted men of torture and extrajudicial killing, is a Brigadier who in August 2025 became Director Movement at Army Headquarters. Lalith Hewa retired a Brigadier in 2024. Their advancement, the report argues, "directly contravenes the preventative dimension of command responsibility" and "exemplifies Sri Lankas systemic failure to implement vetting, disciplinary action, or criminal accountability".

What the families carry

 

Running beneath the institutional record is the human one, and the report does not let the reader look away from it. A mother who searched for her son for 158 days, then heard a whistle at a junction as she waited for a bus and saw him in a passing army truck, hemmed in by soldiers. "As soon as I saw him, I started screaming and crying," she recorded. "The truck passed me and went away." No word of him since.

A man arrested by the army in August 1996 although the soldiers were looking for someone with a different name, "a callous and random substitution". His pregnant wife glimpsed him a week later being loaded into a van at the Kopay camp. She has never seen him again. In 2015, officials told her she must accept a death certificate or forfeit the payments she had been receiving in his name. She refused, and the payments stopped. Her son, now grown, told the ITJP in 2025: "It really is a deep pain losing your father this way without knowing what happened in the end."

The 2003 Committee on Disappearances in the Jaffna Region collected more than 200 such cases from 1996 and 1997, written in a register of numbed brevity: "The victim was a cultivator and was taken away by the Army at Chemmani Check Point on his way to Jaffna by bus with his mother on 29th July 1996. Inquiries were made but there is no news of him." "There is evidence that the victim was a brilliant student and was taken in by the Army from close to his home on 15.08.96. No news of him thereafter." The Committee observed a "callous disregard for human life", and noted how often those taken had simply "stood in the way or were readily available substitutes for the person targeted but who could not be found".

One father, whose son disappeared in August 1996 and whose petition for a proper investigation gathered over 10,000 signatures, articulated the impossible position the state has left families in. "I would be shattered if the remains of my son were found buried at Chemmani, and I would be shattered if they were not," he said. "The only way I can be happy is if my son returns to me alive."

That suspension, the ITJP argues, is itself a punishment. "This prolonged and deliberate failure constitutes a form of punishment in itself, not of the perpetrators, but of the families of the disappeared. They have been condemned to suffer for years in a state of agonising suspense, with no answers about the fate of those they have lost, and no remains returned to them to bury and mourn."

The grave reopens

On 13 February 2025, contractors building an electric crematorium at the Ariyalai Sinthubathi Hindu Cemetery unexpectedly unearthed human remains. The site was formally recognised as both a mass grave and a crime scene that June. Within six days of digging, nineteen complete skeletons had been unearthed, three of them childrens. Perpetrator testimony in 1999 had described victims being buried naked, their clothes burnt to impede identification; the newly recovered remains were likewise unclothed.

The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka reported in September 2025 that some 90 per cent of the remains exhumed were unclothed, which, with the irregular burials, indicated a "reasonable likelihood" of extrajudicial killings. It found that Sri Lanka lacked the equipment and forensic expertise needed for reliable radiocarbon dating or DNA analysis. It recorded "disturbing" allegations of "law enforcement officials intimidating persons involved in the excavation and exhumation work", which threatened to "prejudice the outcome of the investigation". And it noted that, despite the scale of the work, many of those doing it were serving as unpaid volunteers. Its overall conclusion was of "an overarching gap in capacity and will among law enforcement authorities to ensure accountability for the deaths of the persons found at the site".

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, visited Chemmani on 25 June 2025. "At the site I had a chance to meet a family who are still searching and still grieving for a loved one; they hope that his remains may be unearthed there even after all these years," he said afterwards. "Like thousands of others, they want closure after 30 years of not knowing." He arrived in the middle of an Anaiya Vilakku protest and laid flowers before the memorial flame. That October, the plinth holding the flame was smashed and left as rubble. Locals rebuilt it. In December it was vandalised again.

Work stalled through the monsoon as the burial pits flooded with stagnant water, placing fragile forensic evidence at risk. One press report cited by the ITJP recorded that "Tamil civil society observers have described the funding delay not as an administrative oversight, but as a form of obstruction". The third phase finally began on 27 April 2026, ran twelve days, resumed, and continued until 23 June. On 17 June the count passed the 376 recovered at Mannar, making Chemmani the largest documented mass grave in Sri Lanka. Four days later it passed 400. As the report went to press in early July, 412 sets of skeletal remains had been identified and 409 exhumed, with excavation due to resume on 15 July.

Among more than a hundred artefacts recovered are a small sandal, a schoolbag, a squeaky toy, a tiny bead bangle and a babys feeding bottle. On 9 June alone, of nine sets of remains uncovered, seven belonged to children and an eighth to an infant. The report notes the possibility, raised by testimony from survivors who escaped after being left for dead in pits, that some victims may have been buried alive.

We dont have the information for 1998

Against that documentary record, the ITJP sets the conduct of the current government. When the Minister of Justice and National Integration, Harshana Nanayakkara, visited Chemmani on 19 June 2026, he told civil society organisations that identification required "two public requests" by family members "to come forward to identify" any given body, based on a recovered "particular item" associated with the victim. "And they have to tell [identify] the perpetrator," he added. While saying the government "will do whatever necessary to bring closure if a perpetrator can be found with available evidence according to law", he also declared that family informants were not coming forward, "and people dont remember; some of them are not even living".

The report is unsparing about what this framing does: it places responsibility on victim families to come forward and identify perpetrators, notwithstanding the states own independent obligation to investigate serious crimes, and notwithstanding the existence of extensive historical evidence, going back years, including sworn affidavits, habeas corpus proceedings, judicial findings and perpetrator testimony that identifies multiple individuals and military units.

Confronted at Chemmani with the fact that Somaratne Rajapakse had offered in 2025 to provide new information on the burials in exchange for his freedom, including "the names of all high ranking military officers involved in the relevant war crimes", the minister rejected the lead, remarking, "lets see if its true or false separately". He confirmed the government no longer possessed the forensic findings from the remains uncovered after Rajapakses original revelations, nor the records of the wider investigation conducted at the time. "We dont have the information for 1998," he said.

To the repeated demands of families for international assistance to ensure a credible investigation, he maintained that "The criminal law in our country is quite sufficient", with the caveat that "this investigation has not reached that level yet. It is still at the excavation stage". On 25 June he told parliament that the government did intend to seek international help for DNA identification, but "once excavations are completed".

The ITJP calls this sequencing what it is. Delaying forensic identification and broader criminal investigation until the excavations reach a close "risks further prolonging accountability for crimes that have remained unresolved for nearly three decades", when under international best practice recovery, identification and criminal investigation ordinarily proceed in parallel rather than sequentially. On the suggestion that the state lacks information about the perpetrators, the report is blunt: "as this report shows in abundant detail, any such suggestion is simply untrue".

A continuing crime scene

The reports legal analysis concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe members of the Sri Lankan security forces committed enforced disappearances, torture, extrajudicial executions and the secret disposal of bodies, and that "when assessed cumulatively and in their broader context" these "may amount to crimes against humanity". Enforced disappearance, it stresses, "constitutes a continuing violation under international law", so the duty to investigate is not extinguished by the passage of time. It finds that the evidence implicates "not only direct perpetrators but also military superiors and civilian authorities who knew, or who should have known, of the crimes and who had failed to take necessary and reasonable measures". And it identifies denial itself as the mechanism of impunity: "State-sponsored denial, minimisation of crimes, and attacks on victims and civil society actors, or independent institutions undermine the right to truth and in certain circumstances may themselves amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of families of the disappeared."

Chemmani, the ITJP writes, "is not only a site of past atrocity; it is a continuing crime scene in terms of international law". Drawing parallels with Argentinas disappeared, the graves of Srebrenica, Guatemalas counter-insurgency burials and Perus conflict-era disappearances, it argues that in each case obstruction delayed truth while later breakthroughs, driven by forensic science, judicial independence and sustained international pressure, "demonstrated that accountability remains possible even decades after the crimes". The central lesson, it concludes, is that "denial does not stabilise societies emerging from mass violence; it corrodes institutions, perpetuates trauma, and deepens divisions".

The recommendations follow the six demands victim families presented to Türk at Chemmani a year ago: UN monitoring of the excavations, unhindered access for evidence collection, victim representation and technical assistance, expedited funding, re-examination of known mass graves, and referral to the International Criminal Court. To Colombo, the ITJP adds that it should acknowledge responsibility, open prompt independent criminal investigations "that encompass command and superior responsibility" into every alleged perpetrator named by survivors and families, suspend and remove from office any serving officials credibly implicated, replace the Office on Missing Persons, which the International Commission of Jurists found last year "has long suffered from politicization, limited independence, and a lack of public trust", with a body holding subpoena powers and prosecutorial authority, and establish a structurally independent DNA laboratory. To the international community, it recommends sustained scrutiny through UN mechanisms and targeted measures, including sanctions and vetting restrictions, against individuals credibly implicated in Chemmani-related crimes.

"Until the State confronts the truth of Chemmani openly, holds perpetrators accountable at all levels of command, and places victims rights at the centre of its response, the suffering of families will persist," the report concludes, "and the States responsibility under international law will continue to accrue."