Image: Vavnathivu police post after the assault.
A conspiracy hatched by the State Intelligence Service and the Military Intelligence Corps to hinder investigations into the Vavnathivu double murder is coming to light.
The two victims were police constables Ganesh Dinesh and Walpita Gamage Niroshan Indika, who were both stabbed and shot while on guard duty at a police post in Vavnathivu, on November 30, 2018.
Investigators also discovered that the two revolvers bearing numbers 641042 and 639927, respectively, along with 10 rounds of ammunition issued to the two policemen, were missing. Also missing were the belts and caps, which comprise part of their uniform.
At the time, the Army Intelligence Service pointed the finger of blame at LTTE sympathisers.
In statements submitted in 2018 on December 5, December 8, December 14, and January 1, 2019, the Army Intelligence Service claimed that killings were the work of LTTE cadres, angered over police action which prevented commemorating their dead on November 27, 2018.
On December 3, 2018, or thereabouts, based on information received from a Sub-Inspector of the State Intelligence Service, Nilantha Jayawardana informed the CID about the discovery of a motorcycle jacket in a paddy field about three kilometers from the crime scene. It was suspected, that the jacket belonged to the killer. Nilantha Jayawardana had conveyed this information three days after the murders.
Based on the information, a team from the CID was dispatched to Vavnathivu for investigations. The team included the CID’s Senior Superintendent of Police, Shani Abeysekara. When the CID team arrived on the scene, they found a team of officers from the State Intelligence Service also there. They had been sent by Nilantha Jayawardana.
Superintendent of Police Jayasinghe of the Police Kennels, who was on secondment to the CID, was part of the team of investigators.
Though the police dog that was helping investigators traced the jacket to the home of the LTTE cadre Ajanthan, it did not lead them to the scene of the crime. According to Ajanthan’s family, a parcel had been under a bed until the day before that.
During investigations into the Easter bombings, it was revealed that the two intelligence services had falsely implicated Ajanthan and another former LTTE cadre for the murders of the police officers.
Eventually, the then Chief of the CID, Senior DIG Ravi Seneviratne, in a Fundamental Rights petition filed with the Supreme Court, claimed the Military Intelligence Service and the State Intelligence Service had hindered the CID’s investigations by providing misleading information regarding the motorcycle jacket and the killers of the two policemen.
The intelligence officer arrested recently, served under Nilantha Jayawardena, and is suspected of having hidden the bag containing the motorcycle jacket in a drain.
The million-dollar question now is, who instructed Nilantha Jayawardana to mislead the investigators?