Category Archives: Sri Lanka

1848: Puran Appu, Kandy rebel

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Weera Sanadhdhana Weera Balasooriya Kuru Uthumpala Arthadewa Gunaratne Nanayakkara Lakshapathi Maha Widanelage Fransisco Fernando — who is thankfully better known simply as Veera Puran Appu — was executed on this date in 1848 as one of the principals in a Ceylon rebellion against the British.

For several years he had been a famed and colorful bandit in the central highlands around Kandy, and his name bore the romance of the road and the weight of a £10 price. He was “light, well looking, well made, stout, marks of punishment on the back and 4 vaccination marks” in the words of the Brits’ wanted-man bulletin. They forgot to add: political.

In July of 1848, Puran Appu emerged at the head of a popular uprising sparked by land seizures and taxes upon an irate peasantry that every day became more inextricably entangled in the empire’s economic circuitry. It’s known as the Matale rebellion after the central city which Puran Appu briefly held, ransacking government buildings before the disciplined British army was able to rally and put down the rising and stood the rebel in front of a firing squad.

“He died exclaiming, if the king [meaning the self-proclaimed rebel king, in whose name Puran Appu acted] had three men about him as bold and determined as myself he would have been master of Kandy,” the British Governor Torrington* recorded.

He’s honored in Sri Lanka (and Kandy in particular) every year on this anniversary of his death, but fine for any occasion is a 1978 Sri Lankan biopic about, and titled, Veera Puran Appu.

* George Byng was his name, the 7th Viscount Torrington. He’s in the same family tree as the 18th century British admiral infamously executed pour encourager les autres, John Byng: Admiral John was a younger son of the 1st Viscount Torrington.

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1989: Rohana Wijeweera

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On this date in 1989, Sri Lankan Marxist revolutionary Rohana Wijeweera was — by at least some accounts, properly disputed by the authorities — summarily executed

Moscow-educated at Lumumba University, Wijeweera showed his leftist bona fides by forming a splinter party breaking with the Ceylon Communist Party.

Wijeweera wasn’t there to do the People’s Front of Judea thing; his still-extant Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party aimed straight at revolution.

An abortive 1971 rising landed Wijeweera a long prison sentence, but he was amnestied in time to run a distant third in Sri Lanka’s 1982 presidential election.

The JVP — which increasingly also verged towards Sinhalese nationalism — then proceeded to foment a second and much more vigorous rebellion that ran from 1987 to 1989 which was suppressed in the usual ways. There’d be no prison amnesty for Rohana Wijeweera this time.

Officially, Wijeweera’s death in captivity is attributed to crossfire during an ambush shootout with his partisans. Sure. Here’s what Sri Lankan General (and later M.P.) Sarath Munasinghe had to say about Wijeweera’s end:

The time was 11.30pm [on November 12, 1989]. We reached the premises of HQ ‘Operation Combine’. There were many officers of other services too. We were conducted to the conference table where Rohana Wijeweera was seated. I was given a chair just opposite Wijeweera across the table. I commenced having a conversation with him. Mr Ernie Wijesuriya, director, National Intelligence Bureau, his deputy and some others were present. I spoke to Rohana Wijeweera at length.

Whenever I questioned him in English, he answered in Sinhalese. In fact, he asked me whether I knew the Russian language. I replied in the negative. Rohana Wijeweera told me that his second language was Russian. He told me all about his personal life, initially at Bandarawela and later at Ulapane in Kandy. He was reluctant to talk about the activities of the JVP.

While this discussion was going on, the ‘Operation Combine’ commander was with his deputy in the adjoining room, which was his office. Just past midnight, the deputy Defense Minister General Ranjan Wijeratne walked in and sat at the head of the conference table. Gen Wijeratne asked few questions, but Rohana Wijeweera did not respond. Gen. Wijeratne joined the ‘Operation Combine’ commander in his office. We continued with our conversation. We had many cups of plain tea (dark tea), while talking. I made a request to Rohana Wijeweera to advise his membership to refrain from violence. He agreed after persuasion. So we managed to record his words and also his picture in still camera.

After some time, a well-known Superintendent of Police arrived at the HQ Operation Combine. As the police officer walked in, he held Rohana Wijeweera’s hair from the rear and gave two taps on Wijeweera’s cheek. Wijeweera looked back, and having identified the officer said, ‘I knew it had to be a person like you’. The police officer joined the Minister and Operation Combined Commander. We continued with our conversation. Wijeweera related a few interesting stories. One day, a group of JVP activists had visited the residence of Nimal Kirthisri Attanayake [Rohana Wijeweera] at Ulapane. They demanded money for their movement. Wijeweera responded quickly by giving Rs 100. The youngsters did not have a clue about their leader. Wijeweera was full of smiles when he divulged this story.

The time was around 3.45am on 13 November 1989. I was informed to conclude the questioning and to take Rohana Wijeweera downstairs. Together we walked downstairs and were close to each other. Wijeweera held my hand and said, ‘I am very happy I met you even at the last moment. I may not live any longer. Please convey my message to my wife’. Rohana Wijeweera’s message contained five important points. They were all very personal matters concerning his family.

Moments later, Wijeweera was blindfolded and helped into the rear seat of a green Pajero. Two people sat on either side of Wijeweera. There were others at the rear of the vehicle. Just then a senior police officer arrived near the vehicle. I politely rejected his invitation to join them. The Pajero took off. I joined Col Lionel Balagalle standing near the main entrance of the Operation Combine HQ building. We were having a brief chat when a senior officer came downstairs to get into his car. We greeted him. He was in a very good mood. But the atmosphere changed all of a sudden. A military police officer appeared in front of us. The senior officer blasted him for not accompanying Wijeweera and party. The military officer dashed towards his vehicle and sped away. The senior officer departed. We also went home thinking of a good sleep.

Late in the morning I was busy getting Wijeweera’s photograph printed. No one would recognise Wijeweera without his beard. So I had to seek help and add the beard to Wijeweera’s photograph. It was done very well. Late in the afternoon there was a press conference at the Joint Operation Command. Minister Ranjan Wijeratne briefed the press. ‘Wijeweera and HB Herath [another JVP leader] had been taken to a house just outside Colombo, where the JVP had hidden part of their treasure. While the search was in progress, Herath pulled out a pistol and shot Wijeweera dead’. The minister went on to give more details. Subsequent to the killing of Wijeweera, violence by the JVP ceased gradually and there was peace in the country, except in the north and east. [i.e., the zone of the entirely separate Tamil Tigers insurgency -ed.]

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1864: Utuwankande Sura Saradiel, Ceylon social bandit

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Ceylon social bandit Utuwankande Sura Saradiel (or Sardiel) was hanged by the British on this date in 1864.

Saradiel fled a barracks servant’s life to take the road as a bandit. He’s alleged to have gallantly shared his proceeds with the poor; what he unquestionably did was tweak the tail of the powerful (and in this case, colonial) overlords. As is often the case with social bandits, it is difficult to know for certain whether it is for reason the latter that he enjoys the reputation of the former.

The indefatigable brigand was captured multiple times and made at least two escapes — inherently a winning public relations move — eventually maintaining himself from a picturesque mountain cavern and authoring throwback knight-of-the-road exploits to earn the nickname “Robin Hood of Ceylon”.*

Naturally, there is always a Sheriff of Nottingham.


Reward notice for the capture of our man, from the Ceylon Gazette of January 13, 1864.

Saradiel cinched his fate by shooting dead a constable in the course of his arrest. Considering that circumstance, we here at Executed Today are officially skeptical of the legend that a misplaced comma — “kill him, not let him go” when “kill him not, let him go” was intended — decided the man’s fate.

* The best one is that, having robbed from a father what he later learned to be the dowry for a bride-to-be, the robber found his victim again to return the sum, compounded by gambling winnings. Heart of gold, this guy!

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1732: Petrus Vuyst, governor of Dutch Ceylon

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On this date in 1732, the deposed Dutch governor of Ceylon was executed by throat-slashing in Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia) for abuse of power.

Petrus Vuyst (English Wikipedia entry | Dutch) was a Batavia-born son of a Dutch mercantile empire already well upon its decline phase.

Following a loop back to the mother country for espousing and legal training, Vuyst returned to the East Indies and soon advanced in the colonial bureaucracy — governing Dutch Bengal before being appointed the Low Countries’ proconsul in Dutch Ceylon.

The scant information about Vuyst is mostly in Dutch; this public domain document details the proceeding slating him with corruption and wholesale cruelty.

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1962: Talduwe Somarama, Ceylon assassin

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On this date in 1962, the Buddhist monk — turned Christian convert in detention — Talduwe Somarama was hanged for assassinating Ceylon Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike. (Ceylon became Sri Lanka in 1972.)

Somarama was a 44-year-old ayurvedic medicine practitioner when he was tapped for the job by a powerful Buddhist named Mapitigana Buddharakkitha, high priest of the Kelaniya temple. The latter had played kingmaker in Bandaranaike’s 1956 election — and had perhaps two interlocking grievances against Bandaranaike:

  1. Buddharakkitha had been balked by the government of lucrative trade concessions he anticipated as the quid for his quo; and,
  2. Buddharakkitha was closely linked to the movement of partisan Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists who in Ceylon’s early years systematically discriminated against the island’s ethnic Tamils — and were angered at Bandaranaike’s halting moves to reach an accommodation.*

Exploiting the prerogatives of clergy, Somarama obtained a September 25, 1959, meeting un-screened by security for one of the Prime Minister’s public-audience days, a revolver secreted in his saffron robes. When Bandaranaike knelt ceremonially to the monk, Somarama shot him in the stomach.

The wound was mortal, but the Prime Minister lingered on all that night — long enough even to give a televised address from his hospital bed asking his countrymen to “show compassion to” his assassin “and not try to wreak vengeance on him.”* Only months before the murder, ethnic riots had devastated minority Tamil communities, and another pogrom might have been averted on this occasion only the quick thinking of a government official to promulgate immediate word that the assassin was not Tamil.

Ironically Buddharakkitha was so far above suspicion at that he was solicited for a broadcast eulogy of his victim. One can only imagine his relish at the performance — but it was not to last. Buddharakkitha was tried as a conspirator for orchestrating Somarama’s deed, dodged a prospective death sentence, and died in 1967 serving a prison sentence at hard labor.


Talduwe Somara on the steps of the courthouse …


… and Buddharakkitha likewise.

Bandaranaike’s daughter Sirimavo succeeded him as Prime Minister in 1960, becoming the world’s first elected female head of government. A second daughter, Chandrika, and a son, Anura, have also been prominent Sri Lanka politicians.

This three-part series unpacks some of the primary sources on the murder and speculates as to cui bono: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

* Buddharakkitha, also noted for exploring paths to enlightenment with various Sinhalese elites’ wives, was the high priest of the Kelaniya temple — which is the titular temple in the 1953 Sinhalese nationalist tract The Revolt in the Temple, “a blunt statement that the Tamils are a threat to [the Sinhalese] historic mission.” Its author was Don Charles Wijewardena, who had been a patron of Bandaranaike as a young monk; the (still-extant) Wijewardena dynasty had likewise associated itself with the Kelaniya temple itself, the political and the devotional mutually reinforcing one another.

The Sinhala-Tamil conflict stoked in these years has progressed in the decades since to ever-bloodier consequences.

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2013: Rizana Nafeek, Sri Lankan maid

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A year ago today, a blindfolded, white-clad Rizana Nafeek had her head chopped off in public in Dawadmy, near the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan, was among the numerous foreign laborers routinely imported to Saudi Arabia for domestic work. There are an estimated 1.5 million migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia from South Asia (especially Sri Lanka), Nepal, Indonesia, East Africa, and the Philippines. Most are employed via the kafala (“sponsorship”) system that places their host in an almost lord-like position of authority.

Such workers are excluded from Saudi Arabia’s labor protections, and as a result stand vulnerable to horrifying abuse.* Household heads often confiscate these workers’ passports, and in some cases have subjected their domestic employees to rape, beatings, wage confiscation, and work weeks of 100-plus hours. One Sri Lankan woman had nails driven into her hands when she complained about overwork.

Rizana Nafeek hardly had time to find out whether any of these perquisites were in store for her. Not long after she arrived in Saudi Arabia in 2005 hoping to make enough money as a domestic drudge to move her impoverished family into a house, she had bottle-feeding duties for her host family’s infant foisted upon her. Nafeek had no training in caring for infants.

In May 2005, that child began choking while in Rizana’s care, and her panicked shouts summoned the mother. By the time the mother arrived, the infant had fallen unconscious, and the upset family immediately handed over their maid to the police, accusing her of strangling the baby.

This was the victim for whom Nafeek was decapitated, and also perhaps an illustration of tunnel vision in law enforcement. It’s quite doubtful whether there was ever any objective basis for supposing a homicide, but the fact that this was the color the family gave to events in the horror of the moment set in motion all the ensuing events.

During the investigation leading up to her 2007 trial and condemnation, Nafeek confessed to smothering the child — but she would later claim this confession was tortured out of her, and that the baby simply started choking on its bottle. (There was never a post-mortem on the dead baby.)

Opaque as the Saudi Arabian criminal justice system is, it’s got ample reputation for obtaining confessions by violence, and for mistreating migrant workers. And the accused had scant legal representation and no translator when she was tried for her life in a Saudi court.

After her conviction, it would also emerge that, order to land her the gig, Nafeek’s Sri Lankan recruiting agency falsified her papers to bump her age up past the legal minimum of 21. Rizana Nafeek arrived in Saudi Arabia carrying a passport that said she was born in 1982, making her 23 years old when she committed the supposed murder … but her birth certificate said that she was born in 1988, and was still a minor when the “murder” took place.

As an international clemency push developed for the potentially-innocent underaged migrant worker, the Saudi government strongly rejected its critics’ charges.

Noting that the dead infant’s family refused repeated blandishments of “blood money” to exercise its right to grant clemency, Riyadh officially “deplore[d] the statements made” by Rizana’s supporters “over the execution of a Sri Lankan maid who had plotted and killed an infant by suffocating him to death, one week after she arrived in the kingdom.”

More sympathetic Saudis, undoubtedly meaning well, offered Rizana Nafeek’s family cash compensation after the young woman was beheaded. That money, too, was angrily refused.

“I will not accept any gifts from the Saudis or the Saudi government which murdered my daughter,” mother Saiyadu Farina told a Sri Lankan newspaper. That anger was widely shared in Sri Lanka; Colombo even recalled its Saudi ambassador in protest.

That’s as may be, but money is sure to carry the argument at the end of the day. Wage remittances by overseas laborers are a massive boon to the island nation, amounting to $6.3 billion in 2012 — 8.8% of the Sri Lankan economy. And Saudi Arabia remains the single largest employer (pdf) of Sri Lankans abroad.

As of the time of Rizana Nafeek’s execution, at least 45 other foreign domestics, most of them Indonesians, were also awaiting execution on Saudi Arabia’s death row.

* Ill treatment of migrant domestic workers is a phenomenon elsewhere in the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world.

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