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Jesuthasan Rojananth, a 23-year-old Catholic Tamil from Mannar, heard that the security situation in Sri Lanka had improved for ethnic Tamils. So when he had problems renewing his student visa in Malaysia earlier this year, he decided to return to his home country.
He’d been away from Sri Lanka since February of 2010, when he fled the country for security reasons, and was looking forward to seeing his family.
But the happy homecoming would be short lived.
On January 28, a little over three weeks after he’d returned, he was abducted by a group of armed men in a white van.
“They accused me of being an LTTE [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] member who had come to Sri Lanka to regroup the LTTE,” he said over the phone from the United Kingdom, where he has claimed asylum.
When Rojananth repeatedly denied these accusations, the men began torturing him.
“They beat me on the soles of my feet with pipes and electrical wires, and they beat me with wires and plastic pipes filled with sand on my back,” he said. “They submerged my head in water and held me under until I suffocated.”
The next day he was hung upside down and the torture continued.
“I was severely beaten,” he said. “My head was covered with a petrol-sprayed polythene bag. I was suffocating and eventually became unconscious.”
“When they asked questions or interrogated me, they burned me with cigarettes on the chest, shoulders and back,” he added. Continue reading.
Source: UCANews
Image: Scars criss-cross the back of an ethnic Tamil man, who was tortured by Sri Lankan security forces in Batticaloa in September of 2012, UCANews
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