posted March 28, 2001 03:38 PM            

Mannar CSU rapes pregnant woman

[TamilNet, March 28, 2001 18:07 GMT]

“Wijikala was screaming inside the building. I heard her
pleading ‘I have nothing to do with the Tigers. I am a family
woman. Please do not do this to me’. Then some CSU men
came out and told me that they were forcing Wijikala to have
sex with them and threatened to rape me as well. One of the
men tried to strip my clothes. When they saw that my son was
asleep on my lap, a Policeman dragged him away into one of
the buildings in the CSU compound as I begged them not to
hurt him. Two men then pinned me down on the van’s floor
while another stripped me and raped me. I was screaming and
pleading when a Policeman put his foot on my mouth to stifle
me. Inside the building they forced Wijikala, who was standing
naked, to strip my underwear. I was hung upside down in a
knot from a pole placed between two tables, with my hands
and feet tied. Then the men in the room poked our genitals and
tortured us until dawn”, said Sivamani Sinnathamby
Weerakon, the young mother of three who was arrested by the
Counter Subversive Unit (CSU) of the Police in Mannar on 13
March. Wijikala Nanthan, 22, of Alavetty in Jaffna who was
arrested with Sivamani, is pregnant.

The two women were produced before the Mannar district judge M.H.M
Ajmeer by the CSU at his residence and were remanded in judicial custody for
fourteen days. The judge instructed the Mannar prisons officer to have the
women examined by a medical officer forthwith. Wijikala, according to her
relatives, is pregnant and was raped repeatedly by Policemen in CSU custody.

The Mannar Bishop and human rights activists said Wednesday that the CSU
has often been in the habit of arresting women such as Sivamani and Wijikala
from various parts of the Mannar district to rape and exploit brutally under the
pretext of interrogation and extended detention under the Prevention of
Terrorism Act and the Emergency Regulations.

Sivamani said that more than ten uniformed persons surrounded the Aasika
lodge in Uppukkulam, a suburb of Mannar town, on 13 March around 11 p.m.
Sivamani was staying in the lodge with her son as her husband had gone to
Vavuniya to find work. Wijikala and her husband, Shanmugam Nanthan, were
staying in the room next to hers.

The men from the CSU entered the lodge and checked the men and women
separately. They separated Sivamani and accused her of being a member of the
Liberation Tigers. Sivamani denied their charges and showed them her family
album to prove that she was a person with children and a family. She told the
CSU personnel that she was staying in the lodge with her son. They had then
dragged her son from bed to the main hall of the lodge where they were
questioning the inmates. The boy was taken to a corner of the hall and
questioned by the CSU men. Sivamani said she could see that the boy was too
sleepy to answer any of their questions and threats.

“However, they came back to her and threatened her claming that her son had
confessed that she is a trained member of the Liberation Tigers. I cried and
pleaded with them that it was obvious that her son was too sleepy and could
not tell them anything. But they insisted that I was a Tiger. Then they got
Wijikala search my person and me to check her”.

“Then we, Nanthan, Wijikala, my son and I, were taken in a white van to a
place in the town, which I recognised the next day as the compound in which
the Mannar CSU office is located. There, Nanthan and his wife Wijikala were
pulled out of the van and were dragged into a building in the compound. After a
while I heard Wijikala screaming and pleading. Some Policemen who from the
building, told me in lurid detail about how they were forcing sex on Wijikala and
threatened that they would do the same to me. They me told me that the OIC
wants to see me. But I begged them not to harm my little son”.

Sivamani was then raped in the van while her six-year-old son was dragged
away into the CSU office. She was thereafter taken to the CSU’s Officer in
Charge (OIC) Suraweera. Sivamani saw Wijikala standing stark naked in the
room surrounded by more than five CSU men.

“The OIC, a tall fair man with a beard, ordered me to strip naked when I was
made to stand before him with most of my dress torn and stripped. I was
whipped with thick wires when I refused to remove my clothes. The pain was
so unbearable that I was compelled to take off my skirt and blouse. But the
CSU men insisted that I should remove my under wear as well. I refused.
Thereupon a man poked a stick into my underwear and tried to tear them. Then
they forced Wijikala to remove my undergarments and pushed me to the
brightly lit part of the room close to the OIC”.

Sivamani said that Inspector of Police (IP) Suraweera, the OIC, had
lasciviously scrutinised her private parts when she was pushed near him by the
other Policemen in the room.

She was then tied up and hung upside down in a crouching position on a pole
placed between two tables in the room and tortured until dawn, 14 March. The
torture was so severe that Sivamani and Wijikala had agreed to say that they
were military trained members of the Liberation Tigers who had brought bombs
to Mannar from the Vanni.

Three days later they were ordered, while in the custody of the CSU, to sign
confessions typed in Sinhala to the effect that they were members of the LTTE,
had come to Mannar with bombs etc,

Sivamani said she was from the village of Ramanathapuram in Kilinochchi . She
was married to a Sinhalese fifteen years ago when she was fourteen. She has
three children. Her husband, Ranbanda Weerakon Banda of Matale, left
Kilinochchi in 1994 to find work in Vavuniya. Sivamani heard in 1999 that he
had married another woman there. She had come to Vavuniya and met her
husband in November 2000. Ranbanda had then put her up in a house in,
Nelukkulam, a suburb of the northern border town.

A few days later he had brought his mistress to the same house. Earlier this
month Sivamani decided to leave the house as she could no longer stand the
squabbles with her husband’s mistress. She had therefore set out to Mannar so
that she could go back to the Vanni. Her husband had, however, gone along
with her and put her up at the Aasika lodge and returned to Vavuniya. Despite
being informed by the ICRC about her wife’s situation, Ranbanda has not come
to Mannar so far to see Sivamani, sources said.

Sivamani said that CSU personnel have threatened both her and Wijikala not to
give evidence against them if there is a case in courts.