Girl student stripped naked and whipped by SLA

[TamilNet, Saturday, 28 March 1998, 23:59 GMT]
A GCE (O.L) student of Vincent girls's High School in Batticaloa was stripped naked and whipped by the SLA on March 17 claimed her parents this week. The girl,17, who did not want to be identified, lives in the village of Palugamam with her parents.

The TamilNet's Batticaloa correspondent spoke to the girl and her parents this week in Palugamam.

Her father is a farmer.

Palugamam is a large Tamil village, about 26 Kilometers south west of Batticaloa, across the lagoon in the region controlled by the Liberation Tigers.

The girl was boarded at the Vincent Girls' High School hostel.

On March 17, the girl had gone to school around 2 a.m. in the afternoon to obtain her admission card for a GCE (O.L) practical exam which was to be held the next day.

And then she had gone to see a friend at Surya Lane near the Batticaloa hospital. Here, according to her account, she was picked up by the SLA.

She says that the soldiers were accompanied by members of a Tamil para-military group operating in Batticaloa with the army.

She was taken to a camp and was stripped naked and beaten with sticks.

The girl has several scars and contusions on her back.

She was released around 6 p.m. in the evening. Later that night some soldiers had gone to the house in Kallady, on the southern outskirts of Batticaloa town, where she had stayed the day before looking for her. But by this time she had got home to Palugamam.

Her brother Maharajah,17, a student of Shivananda Mahaviththiyaalayam, was shot dead on Dec.22, last year by the Counter Subversive Unit (CSU), a special investigations unit under the Sri Lankan MoD, much feared by the public in Batticaloa. The CSU said at that time that it had shot an activist of the Liberation Tigers. (No action was taken when it transpired later that it was a student).

She could not say whether she was abducted by members of the CSU. The parents said that they are scared to lodge a complaint because the CSU would know immediately. And this would virtually mean, according to her father, that he or anyone of the family will not be able to go to Batticaloa town in the future.