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How Duminda’s trail of broken hearts and Bharatha’s dead body led to gallows’ dais

No prominent members of the Rajapaksa regime, who had once affectionately called him ‘Sudu Putha’ in his halcyon days of untrammeled power, were there to greet him and to wish him well when Duminda Silva arrived at the Colombo High Court on Thursday to hear the court’s verdict as to his innocence or guilt over the murder of Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra on October 8, 2011.

HIRUNIKA: Justice at last for daughter

Only the gaunt spectre of Nemesis, the Goddess of Retribution, bearing her scales, her sword and scourge, stood silently in the wings, patiently waiting to keep rendezvous with him at the shrine of Justice. Along with four others, he had been charged with murdering fellow party member, former MP Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra and three of his bodyguards in a high noon gun battle at the Walpola junction in Angoda on the day of the local government election five years ago. This Thursday was judgment day.
A hush descended on the packed court room as Duminda Silva walked in attired in a untucked white long sleeve shirt — so tight fitting that had he but taken a deeper breath and flexed his biceps by a hair, it would have ripped the flimsy fabric — and black trousers, flanked by a string of bodyguards similarly pumped up and power dressed. After taking his place in the dock with the others who had been charged with him, he waited impassively for the judge to deliver the court verdict.

If he had expected the court to absolve him of any crime, he did not flinch when the judgment held him guilty of murder 1st degree. Nor did he – when Justice Padmini Ranawake, the judge of a bench of three who was assigned to read out the judgment, ordered the court attendant to switch off the court room lights and turn off the twirling fans, and asked the entire court room to rise with her — show any emotion in anticipation of the impending dramatic announcement to be made but, instead, stared blankly ahead, his small face set atop a muscle bound frame resembling that of the enigmatic Sphinx staring at the seamless space of the Sahara.

Nor did he, when the judge, in solemn tones, as befits the grim occasion, proceeded to declare that Arumadura Lawrence Romelo Duminda Silva be sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra, that he be hung from the gallows till he is pronounced dead, did he display any outward show of feeling; though swirling within Duminda’s mind may have been the words of Christ’s apt admonition of reaping the whirlwind after sowing the wind.

If Duminda was staring at the bleak future he now faced and beholding the dead end to which his exploits had inexorably led him, a few yards away from the dock he stood on, a young woman draped demurely in a white sari and black jacket would have been pondering her recent past and the blood soaked tragedy that had brought her to this court to hear the punishment of death decreed for her slain father’s murderer.

Though her father was not the paragon of virtue, Hirunika saw in her eyes or the basket of freshly picked jasmine she smelt in his presence, she had elevated his personage to the status of a national hero whose murder on the streets of Angoda had to be avenged at all costs. To her credit, she, singlehandedly, had fought a valiant battle to see justice done and had taken on the powerful Rajapaksa regime which, for some inexplicable reason, had chosen to cover up the killing of one of their own party members. Had it not been for her, her father’s murder would have suffered the same fate as Thajudeen’s murder; and the killers would still be free.
But if Duminda kept his bleak despair confined to his remorseless heart upon hearing the death sentence passed on him, Hirunika showed no reservations of giving full vent to her emotions on learning that he was condemned to swing for the murder of her father.

As television news cameras panned her from every angle, she broke down in a flood of tears as only a daughter grieving her father’s premature loss could. Fighting, without success, to hold back the cascade of tears, sobbing through the rising lumps of emotion in her throat, choking on her words and tripping in her delivery, she cried, she sobbed, she choked but didn’t fail or falter to bare anew the hurt, the pain, the anguish she had borne day in and day out behind closed doors these last five years.
Yet though her wounded heart bled afresh reliving the trauma, she could not but help, if sporadically, like sudden bursts of spring showers on a parched mound of barren soil, it leapt with subdued joy seeing the back rose of revenge had finally bloomed in her weedy garden bed.

With her mother close at hand keeping a stiff upper lip and not wearing her grieving heart on her jacket sleeve, Hirunika, as the sole spokesperson for the family tears, told reporters:

DUMINDA SILVA: Condemned to swing

“For the last five years we laboured so much to receive this justice today. I came to court every day when the case was being heard and cried before these cameras not because anyone forced me to but because the pain in our hearts compelled me to do so. Whilst thanking the media for the publicity given, I must thank President Maithripala Sirisena above all for ushering in a government that made justice possible. Had not the government changed, perhaps this verdict may have been different. It’s because we have got a new president who has ensured the independence of the judiciary that we have received a correct judgment.”

“We are not that inhuman to gloat over the death sentence being given to anyone,” Hirunika said in a breaking voice, wiping another tear that had emerged from her eye and stood poised to fall, “but for the pain my mother and I underwent these last five years today we have got justice and we are glad about that. There had not been a single night we did not cry, not a single day we have not thought of the tragedy that befell us, not a single moment that we did not feel the sadness of not having my father. “
While Hirunika was speaking to reporters in Colombo’s mid noon sun, it was nearing midnight in another time zone, in another continent nine thousands miles away; and another girl was perhaps reaching for a bottle of red wine to quietly celebrate the breaking news on the websites of Duminda’s conviction for murder. Anarkali Akarsha, 29, now married and settled down in the Californian sunshine, was probably experiencing a memory playback of the giddy life and the heady times she had enjoyed and later suffered as Duminda’s girlfriend.

Each man kills the thing he loves, said Oscar Wilde: and though Duminda didn’t go that far, he, at least, had threatened to kill her should she ever go away. Perhaps, she was the only girl Duminda ever loved and couldn’t bear the thought of her breaking up with him; or perhaps she best fitted his image as the gangster’s moll, the bimbo to his Al Capone. As she has said, “I became a possession, to be shown off to people.”

She would recall Santa’s gift to her on that eventful Christmas in 2007. That was the day they first met. He had the hots for her and she, only 20 years, was instantly bowled over by his direct approach and she soon moved out of her mother’s posh apartment in a Colombo five star hotel, to live with him in his plush apartment at JAIC. But within three months, it became clear to her he was more than enamoured with her. He had become insanely jealous, she claimed. As she told Chandanie Kirinde of the Sunday Times then, “He became a complete control freak. I was not allowed to even talk to my mother, let alone my friends. I couldn’t go out anywhere on my own without his bodyguards. It was like living under a dictatorship.”

BHARATHA LAKSHMAN PREMACHANDRA: Killed in gun battle at street junction

Yes, the words she had said after the break up in describing her relationship with the man now condemned to death as a murderer, would be ringing in her ears in relief that her nightmare is over and she is finally free from his long reach and binding clutches.
She would shudder to think how on July 3, 2008, soon after her break up, she was lured to visiting the house of a movie producer and how she had been accosted by a gang of armed bodyguards; how one of them shoved a pistol into her mouth and taken her into the house; and how she was threatened with death.

Duminda, in return, denied the allegations and claimed that Anarkali was making the abduction claim because he has asked for the money he had given to be returned. “Her mother,” he said, ‘had previously asked me for 10 million rupees to buy a house. I had given her one million which is still in her fixed deposit. I even allowed her mother to stay with us at JAIC Hilton.

But even as the sun went down on him and their affair, her star rose in the political firmament. From the world of entertainment, she was drawn by the crude glitter of politics to contest the Southern Provincial Council elections in 2009 on the UPFA ticket and became the youngest member to be elected. But soon she became embroiled in controversy and her minute contribution to the electorate made her lose the 2014 PC elections. Today, the FCID, it is reported, intends to question her on a business transaction with Namal Rajapaksa.

But while Hirunika glows in public sympathy and Anarkali basks in the Californian sun, another girl, also nearing 30, unsung, unmourned and her whereabouts unknown, must be reliving alone the ordeal she experienced at his hands. In July 2003, she was abducted and taken to a hotel in Mount Lavinia where Duminda Silva allegedly raped her. She was only 15 years of age.
What must be her life today when her bud was nipped in its bloom, her petals crushed, her fragrance snuffed to gratify the carnal urgings of a sex maniac? No one knows, and no one cares. For it’s a cross of pain she must carry alone.

No doubt this Thursday afternoon, as she watched Hirunika speak on live television of the tragedy that had befallen her family as a result of Duminda murdering her father, this poor, innocent rape victim would have recoiled with the horror that befell her when, after the terror of abduction, she was allegedly raped by Duminda in some seedy hotel room. Where was the justice then for her?
Duminda Silva, a UNP member at that time, was charged with abducting and raping an underage girl in 2004. On August 31, the National Child Protection Authority produced another suspect, Ishar, before the Colombo Chief Magistrate. On June 9, 2005 Duminda Silva, Ishar and Kuruppu were indicted before the Colombo High Court on charges of abduction and rape. Kuruppu, having flown abroad was absconding.

SCENE OF MURDER: The day Bharatha Lakshman was gunned down

In 2007, with the case still in court, Western Provincial Councilor Duminda Silva crossed over to Mahinda Rajapaksa’s UPFA. When the case was called on February 24, 2009, the Colombo High Court allowed parties to obtain instructions from the Attorney General with regard to the proposal made by the aggrieved parties to settle the matter.

On May 6, 2009 the Attorney General sought two months’ time to give instruction on the settlement sought by the parties. In April 2010 general elections were held and Duminda was elected a UPFA Member of Parliament. On October 11, 2010, the lawyer representing the victim, claimed that the rape case was causing ‘emotional distress’ to his client, the victim, and filed an affidavit that the client was not in a position to give evidence in the case as she was in ‘trauma’ and prayed the court to release her from the case. The Attorney General obliged and withdrew the charges. Accordingly, High Court Judge Sunil Rajapakse acquitted new UPFA MP Duminda Silva and Ishar from the charges and released them holding they were innocent of all charges.

But there was no acquittal for that young child of 15 from the trauma she suffered that day when perversity was let loose to ravage her body and soul; nor will there ever be an acquittal for her but she will always remain convicted and condemned to live life on solitary row with only her nightmares for company.

But one permanent guest of the Government at the Welikada boutique hotel, drug king pin Velle Suda will be delighted to hear that he will soon be having Duminda Silva within a shout on death’s row.

In February 2015, shortly after the new Government had come to power and arrested, him, Velle Suda claimed that he had paid Rs. 2 million to Duminda Silva, who was the Monitoring MP of the Defence Ministry during the Rajapaksa regime, to continue his drug smuggling activities unhindered. Perhaps he is waiting to send a message through pipe post inquiring what happened to the drug money he gave for protection during the Rajapaksa era to the man he alleged to be the mastermind behind his drug operation. On February 10, 11 and 12, Duminda was questioned for more than six hours by the CID over his alleged links to the drug world and his reputation as a drug lord of the underworld. The result of the marathon interrogation: a 60-page report on the gathered information on his ties to the drug world.

This morning as Duminda Silva wakes in his cramped cell, a far cry from his luxury pad in Colombo 2, to a life on death row he may ponder amazed upon the many vicissitudes of fickle fortune. One day, on top of the world. The next day, at the bottom of the sewer.

Perhaps, in the gaudy light of his present predicament, it may occur to him that, had he spent less time in the gym pumping iron and building his muscle tissue and more time at church listening to pulpit sermons and building his moral fibre, the good lord would not have forsaken him even as temporal powers on earth had ruthlessly cast him away.
But there was one streak of heavenly hope still streaming in through the iron grill of his cage. Though bound in a place where hope never comes that comes to all, primordial optimism rose to lighten the dark. And, for one who had habitually chosen to walk the walk and talk the talk on the other side of the legit street, the prospect, ironically, lay in a legal appeal to escape from his ordained punishment.

True, therein lay some hope. The presiding judge of the tribunal, Justice Shiran Gunaratne had given a dissenting judgment and had acquitted him and all the other accused of all the 17 counts, including committing and conspiring to commit murder, inflicting gunshot injuries, unlawful assembly and criminal intimidation.

According to this judge, some evidence was contradictory and entitled the accused to walk free from court. It was only because the other two judges had not considered the evidence in this light; and had held that, even if some of it could be considered as being contradictory, it was still not to that required degree to merit acquittal and to entitle all the accused to walk free from court as free men as if they had never been involved in the incident; that had brought him from the Elysian fields of freedom to this sorry pass, landed him in this dinghy cell, with a noose dangling round his neck.
But even as he peruses the legal options to pursue, he, and many others like him, spares not the thought, either before the deed or after the action, to the possibility of the existence of a higher court of divine or karmic justice. For them such things exist only in fairy tales or in religious tomes and are for children.

On Thursday morn at Hulftsdorp Hill, no one noticed the gaunt spectre of Nemesis, the Goddess of Retribution, silently waiting in the wings to keep her rendezvous with Duminda at the gates of Justice. No one saw her leave either, the moment after Justice Padmini Ranawake had ordered the court attendant to switch off the court room lights and turn off the twirling fans before rising to deliver the judgment of the court.
And no one heard her mutter to herself that, considering earthly laws delay, she may well have to take up residence in these tropical climes and keep many more rendezvous with many more others to expedite justice in this other Eden.