Excavation of Mannaar mass grave resumes, media access restored

[TamilNet, Monday, 20 August 2018, 23:02 GMT]
Sixty-six human skeletons, including children and women, have been spotted so far and fifty-six of the skeletal remains have been exhumed, said journalists who accessed the site of mass grave excavations at the premises of the premises of former CWE building in the city of Mannaar on Monday. The excavation had been suspended for a few days due to the annual feast at Madu church. In the meantime, journalists in Mannaar have secured access to news coverage of the mass grave site.

The SL Magistrates’ Court in Mannaar prohibited media coverage at the request of the SL Police on 07 August.

Tamil journalists filed an appeal against the motion on 09 August and the Magistrate has reverted the previous decision and provided access to news coverage in the morning and the evening during the days of excavation.

However, the SL Police was attempting to block the journalists from covering the excavation citing the previous instruction from the Magistrate on Monday. The journalists had to document the annulment in writing in order to gain access to the mass grave site.

The SL Police headquarters in Colombo is trying to get the Magistrate to agree for a preliminary examination of the skeletal remains at the lab of a university in the South.

In the meantime, legal activists in Mannaar have warned the possibility of Sinhala Establishment in Colombo influencing and manipulating the preliminary results at the labs of SL State-run universities.

There is a concerted attempt on the part of the SL Police to influence the Justice system not to consider forensic analyses outside the island.

The SL Police hopes to achieve this by manipulating the preliminary test results to predate the time of the killings before the times of Eezham War II (1990), Tamil legal activists said.

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