Missing top Sri Lankan academic may be dead, says family | Canada Standard

Missing top Sri Lankan academic may be dead, says family

Canada Standard (IANS) Monday 4th June, 2007

A respected Sri Lankan academic who disappeared from Colombo six months ago and was believed to have been seized by a pro-government Tamil group has probably been killed, his distraught family said Monday.

After hoping against hope all these months that S. Raveendranath, who headed the Eastern University of Sri Lanka when he went missing Dec 15 last year, was alive a key family member now said that they feared the worst.

Amid media reports that the breakaway Karuna group of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had murdered him, Raveendranath's doctor son-in-law M. Malaravan told IANS over telephone: 'Now I don't even have one percent hope of seeing him alive.'

'I don't know what to do,' said a despairing Malaravan, an eye surgeon in a Colombo hospital. 'My mother in law has collapsed, she is crying non-stop. Our family is in a bad shape. Nobody in the government is telling us anything.

'This is so sad. All these months we kept on hoping that he would be released one day. We wanted him in our midst.

'I am literally begging the authorities to at least confirm if this news about his death is true. Even unofficially no one in the government is speaking.'

The 36-year-old surgeon, who is married to one of Raveendranath's two daughters, said Tamil sources were telling him that the worst was true.

Page 1 of 4 | Next