Kebithigollewa mass grave: No clue on victims yet

No one has so far come forward to identify any of the 16 bullet-riddled bodies found in two shallow graves off Kebithigollewa on Thursday, while post-mortems were held on eight of the victims, a senior police officer said. He said the victims were all men between the ages of 25 and 40 and they had their hands tied behind their backs and were blindfolded. They all had gun shot injuries too.

He said the men had probably been killed elsewhere and brought to this site in Kirikotuwewa in Anuradhapura some six kilometres from Kebithigollewa where they had been buried in hurriedly dug graves by the side of a lonely stretch of road. Meanwhile, a hospital source said some of the men had probably been killed two weeks ago and the rest, a week back. He said the bodies were highly decomposed and were beyond recognition, but they all had indications of gun shot injuries. He said post- mortems on the rest of the victims would be held today.

Anuradhapura Teaching Hospital director Sarath Weerabandu said a Forensic Dental Surgeon would be called in to help identify the victims while requests have been made for DNA testing too. He said one of the problems they faced was the lack of body coolers .“There is only one body cooler with 8 drawers and we have to store parts of 16 bodies in these eight drawers,” he said.

The Hospital’s JMO Ajith Jayasena said the post - mortems were conducted on the orders of Kebithigollewa Magistrate Shiwatha Manchanayake. In an operation that took about four hours, the bodies, 10 of which were buried in one grave and six in the other were exhumed on Thursday afternoon and taken to the Anuradhapura Teaching Hospital.

The bodies were discovered when a villager who had gone to the forest to look for his cattle had seen a hand jutting out of one of the shallow graves and had informed the Kebithigollewa police. The digging operations began on the assumption that there was only one body but soon, it was discovered that there were 16.

Meanwhile The Media Centre for National Security posted a story on its website on Saturday blaming the LTTE for the latest massacre. Villagers of Kirikotuwewa said they had not heard of such a large group of people going missing from their area.