Colombo, Sri Lanka’s Office of Missing Persons is handling almost 17,000 active cases of disappearances while its database contains over 23,000 cases, its chairman Mahesh Katulanda has said.
Katulanda said the figures included disappearances linked to the island nation’s decades-long military conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam , which ended in 2009. Each affected family is being paid a revival payment of SLR 5000 on a one-off basis, he said, adding that it was not a compensation payment. So far, 9,072 families have been interviewed by the OMP, Katulanda said.
“We are dealing with 23,352 cases in our database,” Katulanda said on Thursday while addressing an event to mark the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, observed on August 30. “We hold one-to-one meetings with the relatives of the disappeared to ascertain circumstances which led to the disappearance,” Katulanda said.
He asserted that the government has shown the necessary political will to make the OMP effective by releasing over SLR 375 million to meet the payments. Around 20,000 people are believed to be missing after the end of the war with the LTTE, which killed over 100,000 people, according to an official estimate.
