The 15th anniversary of the murder of Tamil journalist Subramaniyam Sugirdharajan was marked by his colleagues in Batticaloa this week, as they paid tribute to the reporter who was shot dead after exposing the Sri Lankan Special Task Force's killing of 5 Tamil students, in a case that has been dubbed the 'Trinco 5'.
Journalist associations in Batticaloa and Trincomalee joined local politicians and civil society members in paying tribute to Sugirdharajan, who was a well-known and popular journalist from the Eastern province.
Sugirdharajan, who was a journalist at the Sudar Oli paper, had accompanied one of the father of the murdered students, Dr Manoharan to the mortuary and published photos showing the bodies with point-blank gunshot injuries, thereby disproving government claims that the students had been killed by a grenade explosion.
The 'Trinco 5' – remains one of the highest profile killings in Sri Lanka to receive international attention, listed in 2014 by the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights' report on the island as one of four ‘emblematic cases’ of the government's failure to ensure accountability and having been raised repeatedly in international forums.
To date no one has been held accountable for the Trinco 5 murders or for the killing of Sughirdharajan.
