Poddala Jayantha: Sri Lanka Free Press Advocate Abducted, Beaten As Part Of Ongoing Trend

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) - A Sri Lankan press freedom campaigner and government critic was abducted and assaulted while returning from work Monday.

Poddala Jayantha, the secretary of Sri Lanka Working Journalists' Association, said he was pushed into a vehicle by a gang that beat him severely, cut his hair and beard and dropped him by the roadside.

A passer-by brought him to the hospital.

Dr. Hector Weerasinghe of Colombo National Hospital said Jayantha's injuries are not life threatening.

Police spokesman Ranjith Gunasekara confirmed the assault and said authorities don't know who was behind the attack on Jayantha, who had long accused the government of using threats to silence criticism in the media. No arrests have been made.

Journalists and media workers have been subject to violence and threats through the years of the island's civil war that ended last month.

According to Amnesty International, at least 14 journalists and staff at news outlets have been killed by suspected government paramilitaries and rebels since the beginning of 2006.

Others have been detained, tortured or have disappeared. It says 20 more have fled the country because of death threats.

Comments

[RichardWalden]

A fish rots from the head first.

Sri Lanka elected Mahinda Rajapaksa President by a margin of just 1.5% due in part to the Tamil Tigers intimidating Sri Lanka's Tamil minority to sit out the election which caused the previous more moderate government to suffer a defeat at the hands of an extremist, nativist Sinhalese party.
Rajapksa then brought in his 2 brothers as Defense Minister and Counsellor to the President and the three of them drastically ramped up the level of violence in Sri Lanka. When regional power India refused to play ball, they forged military partnerships with China, Pakistan, Iran, Israel and Libya.

Many of the Rajapaksa brothers' tactics resembled those of the US Government during the Vietnam War regarding obfuscating the truth about the conduct of the war, their treatment of the press and their barring outside relief agencies, the UN and independent observers from going near the war zone. What's left is hundreds of thousands of Tamils locked up at a huge internment camp, summary arrests for suspicion of Tiger sympathies and brutalizing what's left of Sri Lanka's once-free press.

[SiberianRat]

Wow, this is disappointing. I've been to Sri Lanka three times (as a tourist--love it there) and it doesn't seem like this is the climate there. I guess the underlying current isn't so visible...

[andyg]

Ouch.