Jeshanika Thivanithan was in grade 8 at St Cecilia’s Girls College in Batticaloa and excelled at extra curricular. The second of three daughters, Jeshanika’s death at the hands of suicide bombers on Easter Sunday has devastated her family.

On Sunday, April 21, thirteen-year-old Jeshanika and her sister, ten-year-old Jeromika, were attending Sunday school at the Zion Church of Batticaloa. They were sitting on the church’s staircase when the first blast went off.

Sri Lanka's permanent representative to the UN in New York criticised UN Special Advisors as "ill-conceived and insensitive" for releasing a joint statement earlier this month, warning Sri Lanka was moving backwards towards inter-ethnic conflict. 

As part of a series marking the atrocities of Mullivaikkal, we invited activists, journalists, and writers from around the world to share their experiences and reflections a decade on.

The Sri Lankan military claimed to have recovered several weapons, Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti identity cards and an ISIS military plan in a series of raids carried out across the island this week.

The army’s official military website claimed that search operations continued as security remains ramped up in the wake of the Easter Sunday attacks last month.

As part of a series marking the atrocities of Mullivaikkal, families of the disappeared protesting in Kilinochchi shared their reflections on their experiences and the struggles they continue to face a decade on. 

The Sri Lankan army held a large ‘victory’ parade in Mullaitivu town, just days after thousands of Tamils gathered for genocide commemorations in nearby Mullivaikkal.

Sri Lanka’s president met with the leader of the extremist Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), a Sinhala Buddhist hate group, the day after he was released following a presidential pardon.

Maithripala Sirisena invited  Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, the general secretary of the BBS to the President’s official residence at Mahagama Sekara Mawatha in Colombo on Thursday night, just hours after he was released from prison. The monk had been serving a sentence for threatening the wife of the disappeared journalist, Prageeth Ekneligoda.  

Sri Lanka's parliament yesterday passed an extension of the state of emergency currently in place since the Easter Sunday bombings. 

China was today the first country to relax its travel advisory to Sri Lanka, just over a month since the Easter Sunday bombings. 

“We are happy announce that the travel ban on visiting Sri Lanka implemented by China has now been toned down to ‘be cautious’ while travelling to Sri Lanka from ‘Do not travel to Sri Lanka’,” Sri Lanka's Tourism Development Authority said. 

Yesterday Sri Lanka's prime minister appealed to the international community to relax the travel warnings issued after the bombings, stating that the security situation was safe.