Mass protest held in northwestern Sri Lanka over murder of aid worker

[News_Editor]

Mass protest held in northwestern Sri Lanka over murder of aid worker

2011-08-04 11:01:20 GMT+7 (ICT)

COLOMBO (BNO NEWS) -- Residents in northwestern Sri Lanka held a mass protest on Wednesday over the murder of a prominent human rights activist whose body was found 17 months after he disappeared, the Colombo Page reported on Thursday.

The body of Pattani Razeek, the managing trustee of Community Trust Fund (CTF) and a leading member of regional non-governmental organization networks, was found on July 28 under a partially built house in the country's Eastern Province. Razeek was abducted by an unidentified group in February 2010 in the city of Polonnaruwa in the North Central province.

The protest on Wednesday began in the town of Puttalam soon after the funeral of Pattani Razeek got underway. Shops and nearby areas were shut down while transport came to a standstill in the area due to the protest.

The United Nations human rights office on Friday had called for a swift investigation and prosecution of the killers of Razeek. Ravina Shamdasani, a spokesperson for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, noted that two suspects in the killing were only arrested in the past few weeks.

"The information they provided reportedly led to the body. Now that the fate of this human rights defender has been established, it is time for an investigation to establish the truth of the circumstances of this heinous crime, and for the prosecution to bring justice to the victim's family," she said.

Shamdasani added that there have been allegations of political interference, while CTF members and Muslim community leaders have been threatened to drop the case. She also voiced hope that there will be a breakthrough in similar cases of people who have disappeared since Sri Lanka's civil war.

The bloody civil war between the government and the Tamil Tigers left as many as 100,000 people dead. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was militarily wiped out in May 2009, ending the 26-year-old civil war.

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