Daughter witnesses mother's murder

[TamilNet, Thursday, 23 April 1998, 23:59 GMT]
Theiventhiram Sakunthala (44), recently widowed and mother of five children, was shot dead in the presence of her second daughter Wajanthi, by an officer of the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) last night 7.45 p.m., said sources in Jaffna.

Sakunthala, who owns a tea kiosk on the Chavakachcheri-Kachchai road in the outskirts of Jaffna town, was going home with Wijanthi after dark when the officer had called out to her and then tried to grab her hand.

"My mother was shot when she had tried to run in panic," Wijanthani told TamilNet's correspondent.

Sakunthala had collapsed in a pool of blood on the road, from where she was removed by the police to Chavakachcheri hospital. She died on admission.

The police report states that the SLA officer, identified as Captain Silva from the Kachchai camp, had shot Sakunthala because she had tried to run. The postmortem was held at Jaffna hospital.

Meanwhile, the Eelam Peoples' Democratic Party (EPDP), confounded the already tense situation by assuming that the People's Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE) was responsible for the killing, because a PLOTE camp was situated near the spot where the shooting occurred.

The EPDP, which has been at loggerheads with the PLOTE in the recent past, seized upon this incident as a good opportunity to embarrass the PLOTE and issued a statement condemning the incident and blaming killing on the PLOTE, said sources.