Sri Lanka’s Court of Appeal has acquitted two soldiers who were initially sentenced to death over the 1996 gang rape and murder of a Tamil woman in Jaffna.
The decision, made by the Court of Appeal last week, saw two defendants, soldier Hevapedike Sarathchandra and Corporal Gamage Kitsiri, acquitted of all charges.
A third soldier Corporal Gamini Saman Liyenake has been ordered to have a retrial.
23-year-old Rajini Velauthapillai, from Urumpirai, was raped and murdered by the Sri Lankan military manning a checkpoint at Kondavil on September 30, 1996.
She was stopped by soldiers at a checkpoint for no apparent reason. Rajini was dragged into a nearby house and gang-raped by the soldiers. They then murdered her. Her battered and naked body was later discovered near the toilet of the compound.
Sri Lanka’s Major General Janaka Perera oversaw troops occupying the region at the time. After years of obfuscation, protection from Sri Lankan institutions, and delays, three soldiers were tried and sentenced to death for the atrocity in 2001. As of last week, two of them have now been acquitted.
Rape and sexual violence have long been used as a weapon of war by Sri Lankan troops in their genocide of Eelam Tamils. For years, Tamil women bore the brunt of gang rapes and murders committed by Sri Lankan troops, with several emblematic cases. In 2009, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the UN Security Council that rape had been used as a tactic of war in Sri Lanka, amongst other places in the world.
Few of the rapists and murderers have ever been held to account.
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