Rajapaksa allowed to testify online on forced disappearances

Sri Lanka’s former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa was on Tuesday allowed to testify online in a long-standing case about the disappearance of two rights activists in 2011.

Rajapaksa was the chief bureaucrat in the Ministry of Defence under the presidency of his elder brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, when the disappearances of human rights activists Lalith Kumar Weeraraju and Kugan Muruganandan were reported. Before their disappearance, Weeraraju and Muruganandan were reportedly planning to hold a press conference in Colombo on a protest to highlight human rights violations against Tamil civilians since the end of a military conflict in the island nation in 2009.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) waged a military campaign for a separate Tamil homeland in the northern and eastern provinces for nearly 30 years before its collapse.

On Tuesday, Rajapaksa was granted permission to testify online without physically presenting himself at the magistrate’s court in Tamil-dominated Jaffna.

Earlier, during his presidential term from 2019-2022, Rajapaksa appealed to the Court of Appeal that he felt unsafe travelling to make the court appearance in Jaffna, the Northern Province’s capital. The court upheld his plea.

At the time of the right activists’ disappearance, Rajapaksa was accused of overseeing abduction squads that whisked away rebel suspects, critical journalists, and activists, many of them never to be seen again. He previously denied any wrongdoing.

However, the case was revisited in 2025, and Rajapaksa was asked to testify in the habeas corpus application on the disappearances in Jaffna.

The three-decade-long armed campaign by the LTTE, which started in 1983, came to an end with the killing of the outfit’s supreme leader Velupillai Prabhakaran as well as the group’s top brass by the Sri Lankan military in 2009.