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Duminda gets return-to-jail card while Gota gets flayed for pardon
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- A daughter’s lone brave battle for justice finally ends in court triumph
Hirunika Premachandra was a mere 23 year old slip of a girl when she learnt that her father, staunch SLFP trade unionist Bharatha Lakshman had been killed in cold blood by the then all powerful Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s protégé Duminda Silva on the streets of Angoda in broad daylight.
THE LONE WARRIOR: Hirunika
The political killing which seemed to have the blessings of the political establishment, was to transform her hitherto fun loving life and tinge the full promise of youth with a grievous sense of injustice that could not be laid to rest until she had avenged her father’s death to the last full measure.
She became the perennial thorn in Duminda Silva’s flesh which he, even with the help of the whole gamut of his political cronies, could not pull out.
And on Wednesday, a daughter’s relentless battle for justice finally succeeded when three Law Lords of the Supreme Court unanimously held that the pardon former President Gotabaya had granted to Duminda was null and void. They ordered 50-year-old Duminda Silva back behind bars to serve the sentence a five-judge Supreme Court bench had affirmed in 2018 for the murder of Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra.
Justice Preethi Padman Surasena reading out the judgment with Justices Gamini Amarasekara and Arjuna Obeyesekere concurring, held that the decision to pardon Duminda Silva ‘is arbitrary, irrational and has been made for the reasons best known to the former President who appears to have not even made any written decision and has not given any reason thereto’.
In his 61-page judgment, Justice Surasena also accepted the Petitioners’ argument that ‘the instant grant of pardon to Duminda Silva by the former President of the country, has totally eroded the confidence the public has reposed in the criminal justice system of the country’.
But though Hirunika’s quest for justice has been triumphant at the end, the road had been fraught with hazardous pitfalls which would have made a lesser woman resign to her fate. Amidst the threats of political foes and against the advice of well-meaning friends to give up her campaign for justice, this lone brave young woman, with only her mother and younger brother as her family, withstood the threats and continued undaunted.
On that eventful day of September 8, 2016, when High Court Judge Padma Ranawaka read out the majority judgment of the court — with the presiding judge, Justice Shiran Gunaratne dissenting — and passed the death sentence on Duminda Silva, she had sat a few yards away from the dock, demurely draped in a white sari and black jacket, pondering her recent past and the blood-soaked tragedy that had brought her to court to hear the punishment of death decreed for her slain father’s murderer. 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.
As the SUNDAY PUNCH of September 11 that year stated: “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 black rose of revenge had finally bloomed in her weedy garden bed.”
THE PARDONER AND THE PARDONED: Gota with Duminda in the good old days of Rajapaksa rule
But her satisfaction in having brought her father’s killers to justice, didn’t last for more than five years. Despite a five-judge Supreme Court bench unanimously affirming the High Court’s sentence of death in 2018, the advent of Gotabaya as President soon gave rise to her disquiet.
He granted a presidential pardon to Duminda Silva on Poson Poya on June 24 2021.
Duminda Silva who had served his life sentence only for three years after the Supreme Court had affirmed the High Court verdict of death, walked away from prison’s death row, a free man. The benefactor of his freedom, the President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, even rewarded him with a plum job. He was swiftly made the Chairman of the country’s National Housing Development Authority within a month of his release.
Hirunika’s efforts lay in the dust, reduced to naught. A decision of a five-judge Supreme Court bench had been practically overwritten by arbitrary presidential fiat. The time had come again for Hirunika to unsheathe her sword which had laid unburnished for want of use, and lead the charge of justice against a president who had come to power with a record-breaking mandate not even two years before.
She and her mother both filed petitions at the Supreme Court challenging the Presidential pardon granted to Duminda. Attorney-at-Law Ghazali Hussain, filed a third petition. On May 31, 2022, the Supreme Court granted leave to proceed and issued an interim order suspending Gotabaya’s presidential pardon. Duminda’s brief year of freedom was at an end with the CID ordered to arrest him on sight.
The CID didn’t have to search far. He was found warded in a private room at Sri Jayawardena Hospital, complaining of a head injury suffered in 2011 shooting incident.
He is still there as he had been since May 31 in custody and under prison guard. But there is no sign of him being removed to serve his interrupted life sentence on death row in prison.
Prisons Spokesman Gamini Dissanayake said on January 18 that the Department has requested Duminda Silva to be transferred to the Prisons Hospital. However, a specialist doctor treating Duminda Silva had insisted that he should undergo treatment at that hospital under his specialist care despite the Department’s request.
On Saturday, however the force of the Supreme Court order prevailed and Arumadura Lawrence Romello Duminda Silva who had been living in relative comfort, freedom and ease as a paying patient in a Sri Jayawardena Hospital room since May 2022, was transferred to Welikada’s prison hospital to resume his life sentence.
And Hirunika’s victory was made replete.
| No tears for one unmourned unsung unknown girlAfter the High Court had convicted Duminda Silva for the killing of Bharatha Lakshman, the SUNDAY PUNCH on September 11, 2016 also focused on the plight of the unknown, unmourned, forgotten Salvation Army 15-year-old orphan allegedly raped by Duminda Silva in 2004. It stated: ‘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. 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 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. In 2007, with the case still in court, Western Provincial Councillor 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. Finally when counsel for the orphaned girl informed court that his 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, High Court Judge Sunil Rajapakse on March 24, 2011, acquitted Duminda Silva on charges of rape and engaging in sex with an under-age girl and released him. 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.’
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| Govt MPs freebie aboard ship rocks the boat in ParliamentThe Sri Lankan Ports Authority has rolled out the red carpet and hosted Government MPs and their families to an exclusive night of revelry at sea aboard two of its dredging ships.The ports Authority had played host and footed the bill at the request of Ports State Minister Premalal Jayasekera. His daughter, as his Co-ordinating secretary, had sent a letter last Monday conveying this request, and had even asked the Ports Authority to supply food and drink free of charge to the party guests on Tuesday night. Around 50 MPs had been invited but only 25 or so had turned up at the Colombo Port. Last Tuesday night’s bash at sea had cost the tax payers an estimated 5 million bucks, with the fuel alone for the sea cruise costing over Rs. 3 lacks, claimed the ports’ trade union chief, Niroshan Gorakanage. After a storm broke out in Parliament last Thursday that public money had been spent on Government MPs to have a ball aboard a ship, it was denied by the State Minister Premalal Jayasekera who hastily held a press conference later in the day to insist that what was held aboard two state vessels was no party but an ‘inspection tour of the port’s progress’. He said: ‘During the budget debate MPs said in return for voting for the Ports Ministry budget, they should be taken on an inspection tour of the port and specifically shown the dredging operation. A video secretly taken in a high security zone has given the wrong impression that state funds were used to stage a party. This was no party but an inspection tour. I paid for the entire tour out of my own funds. The state only paid for the fuel which was some 300,000 rupees. Apart from the fuel I paid for all.’ Then pointing to the same video, he had found offensive, he says, ‘this shows some bottles probably planted. So what, even if I had given, I can give anything I want since I paid the bill except for the fuel.’ How true. My party, my drink. And how so fortunate to have him returned from prison exile after the Appeal Court quashed on March 31, 2022 the Ratnapura High Court’s conviction and death sentence passed on him on July 31, 2020 for the murder of a UNP lifelong supporter who was shot dead in 2015 while decorating a stage where Yahapalana candidate Sirisena was scheduled to address a mass rally in January 2015. After the prison doors were legally unlocked in 2022, he was appointed as State Minister of Ports by President Ranil Wickremesinghe in September that same year. And where was the Cabinet Minister of Ports while all the ruckus was going on in his domain? Nodding off as usual, perhaps, to the beat of his own snores somewhere else, blissfully oblivious that a swinging inspection cruise was taking place in outer port? |
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