In a scathing exposé, Udaya Gammanpila accuses the CID of fabricating murder charges against former Navy Commander Nishantha Ulugetenne using false testimony from LTTE leaders. He claims war heroes are being criminalized while former terrorists walk free, warning this dangerous narrative threatens the fabric of justice and national gratitude.
The former Navy Commander was arrested on the basis of false testimony from a LTTE leader, said Pivithuru Hela Urumaya party leader and lawyer Udaya Gammanpila.
He made these comments at his party headquarters.
It has been clearly established that former Navy Commander Nishantha Ulugetenne was arrested on the basis of false testimony given by a LTTE leader to appease the LTTE. Since I am also in a corner of this story, the war hero community requested me to tell this story to the country.
First of all, I must say that many people know the information I am talking about today. Since the former Navy Commander is in remand custody, I am afraid that if I make a statement, it will be an insult to the court. That is why I am not talking. I cannot comment publicly on a matter that has been decided before the court. That is true. But it is only after charges are filed and a trial begins that a matter is decided by the court. Charges have not been filed in this case yet. There is still only a police investigation being conducted under the supervision of the court with the assistance of the court. Therefore, no one should hesitate to speak publicly about this.
Lieutenant Commander Krishan Welagedara, a Navy intelligence officer, was demoted from seniority by a military court in 2017 when his involvement in human trafficking was revealed. He fled Sri Lanka to Australia and fabricated false evidence for the Tigers in the hunt for war heroes. His main target is Commander Sumith Ranasinghe, the then Navy Intelligence Chief in Trincomalee, who exposed this human trafficking. The story that Shantha Samaraweera, an underworld leader who escaped from police custody on July 26, 2010, was in the Gunsite Navy detention camp in Trincomalee is a joint creation of Lieutenant Commander Welagedara and the CID.
Shantha Samaraweera was arrested by the police on July 25, 2010. That night, he was admitted to the hospital because he showed signs of illness. On the morning of July 26, 2010, he escaped from the hospital while receiving treatment at the Alawwa Hospital. Based on the evidence provided by the LTTE leaders that the underworld leader was in the Gunsite camp with them, a group of naval war heroes including former Navy Commander Nishantha Ulugetenne and former Naval Intelligence Director Sumith Ranasinghe were arrested. These people are building a very wonderful story for this.
Welagedara is working to recruit LTTE member B. M. Wijayakanthan, who was arrested and rehabilitated in 2008, into the Navy as an intelligence officer. This Wijayakanthan is using it to claim that the Navy is responsible for the disappearance of 11 youths who disappeared from Colombo and the underworld leader who escaped from Alawwa. Welagedara and Nishantha Silva, who has now fled Sri Lanka and is in Switzerland, are keeping Wijayakanthan in a room and training him to give evidence. They are asking Wijayakanthan to hand over this soap paper after giving a statement to the CID that Shantha, who was with him, wrote information about him on a piece of paper and gave it to him. They are also asking him to provide information about the 11 youths who disappeared in Colombo and tell them that these people were with him. When Vijayakanthan expressed his unwillingness to give false evidence against the Navy, Welagedara threatened Vijayakanthan that he would be fired from his job.
Accordingly, when Vijayakanthan went to the CID, he was given a statement written in Sinhala and asked to sign it. He could neither read nor write Sinhala. But he signed it to save his job. Even if he was a Tiger, Vijayakanthan’s conscience was troubled by giving false evidence against the Navy where he worked. Therefore, Vijayakanthan found me and told me what really happened. Accordingly, I produced Vijayakanthan before the Fort Magistrate’s Court and recorded a statement before the Magistrate on January 2, 2018. There, he told the truth. On one hand, he signed a statement written in a language he did not know, saying that he had read, understood and signed it. On the other hand, Vijayakanthan was in the camp from late 2008 to early 2009. Shantha disappeared, or rather escaped from police custody on July 26, 2010. So even if Shantha was actually in the Gun Site camp, there is no way that Vijayakanthan could have seen it.
It was because of Vijayakanthan’s statement that we were able to stop the hunt for a large number of war heroes, starting with Admiral of the Fleet Wasantha Karannagoda, who led the Navy during the LTTE war.
The people who had taken over the war hero hunting contract from the LTTE were going crazy with the work we did. These people found an alternative. That was the CID going to find Selwathambi Mahendran, alias Bharathi, the LTTE intelligence chief in the Trincomalee district. He was also rehabilitated at the Gun Site camp. Bharathi agrees to give a statement to the police that 11 young men and Kegalle Shantha were with him during his time at the camp. When he gets the chance to take revenge on the war heroes who ruined Bharathi’s dream of becoming a leader in the Eelam state, he does not give up.
It is based on the statement obtained from Bharathi that Commander Sumith Ranasinghe and a group of intelligence officers are arrested. It is based on Bharathi’s statement that Nishantha Ulugetenna, who was the then Director of Naval Intelligence, came to visit the camp one day while he was at the Gun Site camp, that the former Navy Commander is arrested on charges of murder.This is a very dangerous situation. If a LTTE terrorist says tomorrow that Gammanpila has come to the camp where he was being held, he will be arrested tomorrow with murder charges.
Trincomalee Intelligence Chief Bharathi was brought to the Polgahawela Magistrate’s Court on July 30 to identify the Navy Commander by making him stand in an identification parade. When the Magistrate asked Bharathi questions in Sinhala, she did not understand anything. The Magistrate questions the CID how they obtained a Sinhala statement from someone who could not speak Sinhala. Otherwise, the Navy Commander would have been made to stand in the parade and the Tiger leader would have been paraded to identify him.
The war heroes are very lucky. The war heroes were saved in the first round because Vijayakanthan’s statement was written in Sinhala first. Vijayakanthan was spared in the second round because he told the magistrate that he was forced to sign. Despite that, Bharathi’s statement was also written in Sinhala, so he was spared in the third round.
Today I will expose another lie that the CID used to fabricate evidence. One piece of evidence that was fabricated to prove that Shantha was being held at the gun site was a photograph of a wall at the gun site camp with the words “Shantha Kegalle 2010.07.25” scrawled on it. But fortunately for the war heroes, there was a mistake there too. That is, Shantha escaped from the Alawwa Hospital on July 26, 2010. He was in police custody throughout July 25, 2010. In that case, the fact that he was in Trincomalee on July 25 is another lie that the CID is playing with. If the statements written by the CID were submitted to a literary award instead of being submitted to the court, they would be able to win the Golden Book Award to the Gratian Award locally and the Nobel Prize internationally. The CID writes novels so creatively.
If there are people with a conscience in this country, think for a moment. The Navy Commander, who risked his life to save our lives, is being examined in a parade to identify the murderous LTTE terrorist leader who tried to take our lives by putting him in a queue. This is an unfortunate thing that has never happened in any country in the world.
The Navy Commander who saved our lives is in jail today. There is no case against the LTTE terrorists who took up arms to take our lives. They have been rehabilitated, are receiving gifts from the government and are happily living a normal life. Is this fair?
Your Excellency, you are living peacefully today because of the gratitude of the war heroes. Or you could have been blown to pieces by a bomb somewhere. Every time you take a breath from your nostrils, you owe it to the war heroes. The pro-LTTE groups must have provided you with money to hold elections. They must have provided you with votes to win elections. They must have provided you with the highest level of hospitality when you went to Canada, England, or Germany. But don’t make it a crime to save the country by falsely accusing the war heroes who saved the country. If you do that, you won’t be able to sleep at night. Your conscience will be filled with regrets that I am a great sinner.
