Body of Lasantha who foresaw his murder to be exhumed tomorrow
September 26, 2016 02:24 pm
The body of a celebrated Sri Lankan journalist gunned down in the final months of the country’s brutal civil war in 2009 will be exhumed on Tuesday as part of a fresh investigation into his death.
Lasantha Wickrematunge’s grave in Colombo has been under armed guard since the new autopsy was announced earlier in September, two months after a military intelligence official was arrested in connection with the killing of the former editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper.
Wickrematunge had foreseen his impending murder and wrote an editorial that was published three days after he was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles while driving to work in January 2009.
“When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me,” he wrote, in a 2,500-word piece that was republished by The Guardian and The New Yorker and attracted international scrutiny of the harassment faced by Sri Lankan journalists.
-scmp
-Agencies
