Sri Lanka's missing persons office has nearly 17,000 active cases, says chairman

Sri Lanka's Office of Missing Persons (OMP) 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 (LTTE), which ended in 2009.

"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.

He added that there are 16,966 active case files of disappearances after weeding out duplicates and those missing in action.

Set up in 2016, the OMP is a state institution tasked with bringing closure to suffering victims and their relatives by determining the status of all missing persons in Sri Lanka.

“We hold one-to-one meetings with the relatives of the disappeared to ascertain circumstances which led to the disappearance,” Katulanda said.

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.

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.

The OMP, which became operational in 2018, investigates and traces people who have disappeared by examining the circumstances that led to their disappearance. It also maintains a database of missing and disappeared persons.

According to an official estimate, around 20,000 people are believed to be missing after the end of the war with the LTTE, which killed over 100,000 people.

There are cases of armed conflicts involving the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna in the country’s south too.