{"id":41688,"date":"2017-09-30T01:11:50","date_gmt":"2017-09-30T05:11:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=41688"},"modified":"2017-09-30T02:01:50","modified_gmt":"2017-09-30T06:01:50","slug":"vidhya-sivaloganathans-family-in-pungudutheevu-is-waiting-for-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=41688","title":{"rendered":"Vidhya Sivaloganathan\u2019s Family in Pungudutheevu is Waiting for Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n


\nBy<\/p>\n

Thulasi Muttulingam<\/strong><\/p>\n

(This Article written in 2015 is being re-posted now in view of the verdict issued by the three -member trial – at- bar bench in Jaffna on March 27th 2017. Vidya Sivaloganathan’s family has obtained justice for now)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Vidhya Sivaloganathan<\/strong><\/em>\u2019s family remembers her as sensitive and soft. She had recently cried when her mother said they would have to sell the family\u2019s goat because they couldn\u2019t afford to keep it anymore. \u201cNo amma. She\u2019s part of the family now. We\u2019ll reduce our meals and share with her what we eat. Please do not give her away,\u201d she had begged. Every evening as soon as she returned home from school, she would go straight to her \u2018pets.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"Vidhya<\/a>

Vidhya Sivaloganathan<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe reared the livestock \u2013the goat, the cow and the chickens for eggs and milk but Vidhya always treated them like personal friends,\u201d recalls her mother Saraswathi Sivaloganathan. \u201cI often scolded her over it because she was always cuddling them and getting her white uniform dirty. She would cuddle them before going to school and then cuddle them as soon as she returned from school too. Kutty the goat would beckon with her horned head to Vidhya for more cuddling when she left for school. She would laugh and say, \u2018I\u2019ll pet you more, as soon as I get back Kutty.\u2019 That was their ritual. As soon as she returned, all the animals would go to greet her including Chella Mani the hen, clucking all the way. She would pick the hen up, pretend that she could understand its seemingly indignant clucking and say, \u2018Oh is that right Chella Mani? Amma hasn\u2019t fed you properly today? How mean of her, here have some biscuits.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"kutty-the-goat\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cShe would then feed the hen securely tucked under one of her arms, pieces of biscuits with her other hand while still in her school uniform,\u201d recalls her mother tearing up at the memory. \u201cIt used to annoy me no end but now all those memories are so bitter-sweet to us. It is who she was. If I ever scolded her for talking to dumb animals as equals, she would say, \u2018amma they are not dumb animals. They are intelligent sentient beings without a voice. We have to be extra kind to them.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe animals knew,\u201d says her brother Nishanthan (22). \u201cIt was finally the dogs who led us to her body. On the days leading up to her funeral and at the funeral itself, the dogs and goat acted half-crazed against certain individuals, wanting to head-butt or bite them. We thought they had become unbalanced with grief just as we had and tied them up. But it turned out the individuals the animals had been reacting against, were Vidhya\u2019s rapists and murderers. They had had the nerve to show up repeatedly at our house to offer their sympathy until the police caught them.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Much has been reported in the local Tamil press and online websites about the case but the family deny many of the incidents thus reported as unfactual.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirstly, I had no idea who could have done this to my daughter. We had no enemies in the area,\u201d says Vidhya\u2019s mother. \u201cIt has been reported that I witnessed a robbery and reported it to the police causing this revenge-killing of my daughter in such a dastardly manner. This is simply not true.<\/p>\n

\"vidhyas-other-dog-and-chickens-about-her-house-premises\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last year, I had happened to notice one of the houses of my relatives abroad, who kept their house locked up, with its gates wide open. I informed my relative of this \u2013she in turn informed the local police from abroad and they had happened to catch some people on their own. I had nothing to do with it and I don\u2019t think it has any implication in my daughter\u2019s rape and murder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bursts out her brother angrily, \u201cWhat may I ask is wrong with my mother\u2019s action? People keep blaming us for it as if Vidhya\u2019s fate would have been spared but for this incident. We don\u2019t think so. This island suffers under too much a climate of crime along with too much a climate of fear of exposing the criminals. That is why incidents like these happen again and again. Even in Vidhya\u2019s case, two young boys aged 10 and 13 had seen something but had been too scared to say anything. Though they initially admitted to being witnesses at least in part to the crime, they have now been coached by their parents to retract the story and say they saw nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the family, when they went looking for Vidhya after 3.00 pm on May 13th when she still hadn\u2019t returned from school, the only one to talk of seeing her at all was one particular schoolboy. He had said that he and a schoolmate had been trailing behind Vidhya on their cycles when she turned a corner ahead of them and they heard a crash. When they turned the corner themselves, they had seen her overturned bicycle and one shoe but Vidhya herself missing. One of them had also seen a flash of a yellow shirt among the bushes, but nothing more. They had apparently continued on their way to school without thinking to mention this incident to anybody.<\/p>\n

\u201cI screamed when I heard this story,\u201d says the mother. \u201cI asked the boy repeatedly why he hadn\u2019t thought to raise the alarm at least to the teachers. At school, the teachers had merely thought Vidhya was absent for the day; but she was a girl who didn\u2019t like to miss school even if she was sick. The rapists had planned it well to kidnap my daughter on her way to school. We didn\u2019t think to look for her until several hours later and by then it was too late.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The path along which Vidhya traveled to school every day<\/p><\/div>\n

After hunting for her in all possible places in and around the stretch from her home to her school, the frantic family finally informed the nearest police station at Kurkattuwan. \u201cThere they said they couldn\u2019t lodge complaints and to take our case to the Kayts police station. By the time we reached the Kayts police station, it was 11.00pm,\u201d says Vidhya\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n

She denies reports that the police were rude to her but says that it was difficult to communicate with them as they spoke only Sinhala. \u201cOnly the three-wheel driver who took us to the station could manage a conversation in Sinhala and he haltingly explained our situation to the police. They said that with girls of her age (18 years), elopements were common but they weren\u2019t rude about it. They sympathetically told me not to worry, that it might after all turn out to be a voluntary elopement and to go home; that whatever had happened might come to light the next day. They also told us to keep them informed of any developments.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was raining heavily and past midnight by the time the anxious family reached home, yet all the talk of elopement had ironically given them a sense of hope. To their knowledge Vidhya neither had a boyfriend nor was interested romantically in anyone, but at this stage they were desperately hoping that she was alright somewhere, and thus were clutching at straws. They were unwilling to let the thought of any harm having befallen her cross their minds.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The abandoned house behind which her body was finally discovered<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cEven the local people when we went looking for her all over the place on the day she went missing (Wednesday May 13) snickered that she must have eloped,\u201d recalls Vidhya\u2019s mother. \u201cWhen I denied that my daughter had any such inclination, some suggested that perhaps some boy infatuated with her, even without her complicity might have abducted her. All this talk confused me and lured me into thinking it might be a possibility. I kept nervously wondering how and where we would find her but I certainly never ever thought we would find her as we did \u2013 gang-raped and brutally murdered.\u201d<\/p>\n

She covered her face with her hands at this point to blot out the horror of that memory. The entire family has been deeply psychologically traumatized over the horrific misfortune that befell their beloved youngest member. All of them are apparently repeatedly falling ill due to this and are constantly in and out of hospital as a result. On the day I visited, Vidhya\u2019s father, a stroke recovery patient was at the hospital for further treatment. He had been recovering well from his stroke of two years before but this incident has again heavily impacted his health.<\/p>\n

It was Vidhya\u2019s brother Nishanthan who saw her body first. They had set out again to search for Vidhya at the crack of dawn the next morning. The father being debilitated and the sister being away at University, it was the mother and brother accompanied by two neighbours who set out on this second search expedition. Vidhya had had to travel down a sandy narrow path to school. The searchers had split into two pairs to search on either side of this path, with the mother on one side and the brother on the other.<\/p>\n

\"Vidhya\u2019s<\/a>

Vidhya\u2019s beloved dogs<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t consciously take the dogs with us, they just happened to come along,\u201d explains the mother. \u201cAs soon as it dawned, we went out and the dogs who are not usually in the habit of following us outside, came too. I suppose they sensed our grief and perhaps missed Vidhya and wanted to look for her as well.\u201d On the previous day however, Nishanthan had taken the dogs out with him in one of his frantic searches for his sister. They had run about sniffing all over the bushes as if they had sensed his mission and their role in it, and the next day had taken it up again without anyone asking them.<\/p>\n

It was eventually one of the dogs Jimmy, who led Nishanthan to his sister\u2019s body. While the youth was scouring about in the bushes, Jimmy appeared with one of Vidhya\u2019s shoes in his mouth. He had then led the dazed Nishanthan to the back of an abandoned derelict house, to where his sister\u2019s body lay on a heavily accumulated pile of fallen leaves.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was on the other side of the path, looking into a well when I heard Nishanthan yell out \u2018Ammaaaa\u2019\u201c says Saraswathi, the mother. I immediately ran over, tearing my feet over the thorny bushes in my haste, and found Nishanthan fainted on the ground. From the periphery of my vision, I saw my daughter\u2019s discarded uniform and looked no further. To this day, I have not looked at what condition she was found in, although I understand it has been made widely public all over the internet. I do not want to know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jimmy<\/a>

Jimmy
He\u2019s clearly still disturbed, continuously howling and has to be tied up<\/p><\/div>\n

Bursts out her elder daughter Lishanthini (24), Vidhya\u2019s sister, at this point, \u201cWhy are people doing such despicable things as sharing my poor sister\u2019s photo like that over the internet? We as a family find it deeply offensive and insensitive to Vidhya\u2019s memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her brother has another point to add: \u201cThey say, that photo circulating of Vidhya\u2019s body was taken by local vigilantes to raise awareness on what had happened to her. That is not true. If you look at the picture, you can see her dry body on a dry pile of leaves with blood stains from her mouth to her chin. It had been raining the night before we found her. I was the first to see her body and it was water logged, lying on muddy water-soaked leaves and all stains including blood had been washed off from her body by then.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn fact,\u201d he adds, \u201cthe police when they eventually showed up at 10.00 am told us that the rain might have done much damage in washing away whatever evidence there were. I think it was the perpetrators themselves who took this photo and then released it. They felt so invincible and proud of their actions that they felt able to do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The shrubbery by which she is believed to have been kidnapped<\/p><\/div>\n

Nishanthan also believes that the abandoned house behind which his sister\u2019s body was discovered is not the actual scene of her rape and murder. \u201cI went out the previous day along that path to search for her. The dogs accompanied me then too. How come they didn\u2019t sense her there at that time? I think the perpetrators had abducted her to one of their houses and then simply dumped her body there past midnight.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some of the arrested suspects\u2019 houses have been damaged \u2013 fully or in part, by angry villagers. Or so the story goes. There is an uneasy suspicion on the part of some people including Vidhya\u2019s family that this might be a good way to get rid of evidence as well.<\/p>\n

Udeni Thewarapperuma, a women\u2019s rights activist and lawyer following this case, has the same concern: \u201cWe don\u2019t yet know if it was protesters or the perpetrators themselves who damaged those houses \u2013 but people should be alert to the possibility of evidences being obscured via this method and should not become unwittingly complicit in it. At this stage in the investigations we should have strong evidence collected against the suspects \u2013 and it worries me that we still haven\u2019t heard of what that evidence is, or how strong the case against the arrested suspects is. As with the recent Kotakethana murder acquittal case, we do not want to hear some years down the line that the suspects have been let go of due to lack of evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

This issue might be more of a real worry than many people euphoric over nine suspects being caught might think. According to several online websites which the local Tamils are following voraciously, the perpetrators were caught with the rape videoed on their mobile phones. It has even been alleged that this entire tragedy was enacted due to one of the suspects, a Swiss PR Resident, being in the business of extreme sado-masochistic pornography; that Vidhya was raped and killed for the sake of such a pornographic video and that this high definition video had been apprehended too.<\/p>\n

Police spokesperson ASP Ruwan Gunasekara however denies this. \u201cThe suspects were caught on the information of local people. We have no video evidence of the crime and while forensic investigations are ongoing to match samples of DNA between suspects and what was found at the crime scene, the results are not out yet; they will take some time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Part<\/a>

Part of the path she had cycled through that day<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cIn any case,\u201d ASP Gunasekara further clarified, \u201cthis investigation is not in the hands of the police anymore. A special unit of the CID is investigating the case now. The special investigations unit is also investigating whether there were any lapses in the Jaffna police\u2019s handling of the case, due to widespread people\u2019s protests over the issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

That issue in question would be on how one of the main suspects apprehended and handed over to the Jaffna police \u2013 the Swiss Resident had been spotted on the loose in Wellawatte, Colombo the next day. Due to massive people\u2019s protests in Jaffna, he had then been apprehended by the Wellawatte police and brought back to Jaffna. A leading law academic has been implicated in the matter by the online Tamil websites and local press but he has refuted the allegations as baseless. ASP Gunasekara declined to say more on the matter other than that investigations are on-going.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile calls to the editors of two popular Jaffna Daily papers also gave some contrasting information. According to one editor, it was unprofessional online websites which had made the claim that video evidence and thus the right set of suspects had been caught, with a strong case against them. \u201cWe did not make that claim until two days ago when Minister Rajitha Senaratne too said this seems to have been a case of pornography-related crime. We then quoted him on the matter but we did not make that claim otherwise, as it had not been substantiated till then.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the other editor however, local vigilantes who had caught and beaten the suspects before handing them over to the police had reported that they had checked the suspects\u2019 mobile phones and found the video evidence. \u201cThey said that they handed this evidence over to the police too. If the police are now saying they have no such evidence, we wonder how much of mishandling has occurred over the investigations on this case,\u201d was his response.<\/p>\n

President Maithripala Sirisena when he met the family in Jaffna had promised them a fast-track court and swift investigations to bring the criminals to book. That is all they have now to look forward to. Their gentle, animal-loving Vidhya who had skipped off to school on May 13th after telling her pet goat that she would get back to pet her some more, will no more turn in through their gate to do just that. All that her grieving family can hope for is that the perpetrators of the horrible crime against their beloved girl be brought to book.<\/p>\n

It might not seem like much but in Pungudutivu, Vidhya\u2019s mother had been told not to expect even that much. \u201dThis is not the first time a horrific rape \/murder has happened here. The perpetrators in each case are never bought to book, and as soon as her body was found, people told me that those who had done this to Vidhya would never be brought to book either.<\/p>\n

\"Vidhya\u2019s<\/a>

Vidhya\u2019s mother with Kutty<\/p><\/div>\n

I have faith however. I went to the temple and tried to light camphor to send my prayers up to God. It was raining and I couldn\u2019t light the camphor. I raged at God for not giving me even this solace but then it stopped raining. The rain stopped only until I could finish lighting the camphor and make my prayers demanding that the perpetrators be caught. As soon as I finished and turned back to go home, it started pouring again. God head my prayer. That very day, I heard three people had been arrested and many more arrests followed in the days after. I want justice for Vidhya.<\/p>\n

President Maithripala told us that it was not within his power to deliver Vidhya back to us \u2013 but that he would do all he could within his power to deliver justice. We are waiting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pix and Captions:Thulasi Muttulingam<\/strong><\/p>\n

Courtesy :eyeofthecyclone.wordpress.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Thulasi Muttulingam (This Article written in 2015 is being re-posted now in view of the verdict issued by the three -member trial – at- bar bench in Jaffna on March 27th 2017. Vidya Sivaloganathan’s family has obtained justice for now) Vidhya Sivaloganathan\u2019s family remembers her as sensitive and soft. She had recently cried when …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Vidhya Sivaloganathan\u2019s Family in Pungudutheevu is Waiting for Justice’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41688"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41688"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55504,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41688\/revisions\/55504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}