Two missing girls in Vavuniya found

[TamilNet, Monday, 06 October 2003, 02:42 GMT]
Two school-going girls aged 15 and 16, who left letters at their homes saying that they were going to join the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), were later found in a vacant home in the Maravankulam settlement in Vavuniya by neighbors, sources in vavuniya said.

The neighbors handed over the girls to the LTTE, who handed them over to their parents in the presence of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) officials Sunday, said Mr. S.Ezhilan, the political head of the LTTE in Vavuniya.

The parents had complained to the SLMM that the girls had been missing since October 1st and they might have joined the LTTE. The SLMM brought the matter to the notice of the LTTE, but the LTTE said the girls in question had not joined them and could not locate them.

On Sunday, neighbors at the Maravankulam settlement found the girls in a vacant home and notified the LTTE about it, sources said.

The girls were taken on October 1st by two men to the predominantly Sinhala areas south of Vavuniya, where they stayed at a lodge overnight and returned to Vavuniya the next day. In Vavuniya, 3 other men took them to Mannar and stayed there in a lodge and returned to the Maravankulam settlement where one of the three men who took the girls to Mannar and another man stayed in the vacant house. Where the neighbors found the girls at the house, the two men ran away, sources said.

The girls have said that they don't know the identity of the men who took them to different places. The SLMM has left the responsibility of finding out and apprehending the culprits with the Sri Lanka Police in Vavuniya, the sources said.