NPC Councillor initiates action to assist Muslim political prisoner’s family

[TamilNet, Sunday, 16 October 2016, 16:29 GMT]
Northern Provincial Council member Ms Ananthy Sasitharan has come forward to facilitate assistance to Ms Segu Mohaideen Noorjan, a mother of three and the wife of a Muslim political prisoner after the latter made an open plea for assistance to fight for the release of her husband and to help her cover the expenses for the education of her children. “There should be a collective political decision on the part of the Sri Lankan State and its leaders to release all the political prisoners. I have therefore chosen to facilitate initial assistance for Ms Noorjahan’s family to sustain its livelihood,” Ms Ananthy Sasitharan told TamilNet on Sunday adding that she had promised to facilitate assistance to enable Ms Noorjan to do farming on her own.

While all the suspects have been released 6 years ago, Noorjan's husband Mr Abdul Hameed Umar Hattaaph, has been falsely alleged of involvement in the assassination of a former commander of the genocidal military, Major General (retd) Janaka Perera, according to the mother of three.

NPC Chief Minister Justice C.V. Wigneswaran also met Ms Noorjan, when the latter was invited to NPC by Ms Sasitharan on 05 October 2016.

The Tamil-speaking political prisoners have staged several protests since 2009 and the response from the SL State has always been deceptive. As the repeated protests and fasting campaigns went to deaf ears, they were started to agitate demanding the SL Attorney General’s Department to speed up the processing of their cases in the SL courts. But, the SL Attorney General’s Department has responded with attempts to transfer their cases from the courts in the North-East to avoid their cases being heard by Tamil judges.

Around 125 Tamil-speaking political prisoners are languishing for several years, some of them for more than 20 years in the SL prisons under the notorious Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA).

At the same time, the families of thousands of people who have been subjected to enforced disappearances during the three-decades war are struggling to find out the whereabouts of their kith and kin. Ananthy Sasitharan is one of among them searching for her husband Mr Sasitharan alias Elilan, who was a political leader of the LTTE. Elilan was handed over to the SL military in front of her family on 18 May 2009 at Vadduvaakal in Mulllaiththeevu.

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