Sri Lanka’s prime minister Mahinda Rajapaksa claimed that countries were "angry with our armed forces,” as he addressed new troops at a passing out parade in the south last month.

A Tamil journalist who was murdered by the Sri Lankan army in 1985 was commemorated by his family, colleagues and community members in Amparai last week.

Ganapathipillai Devaraja was arrested in a Sri Lankan military roundup on December 25 1985, and assassinated at the Vattuvan army camp. He was working as a journalist for Virakesari at the time.

Sri Lankan police in plain clothing entered the house of a Tamil Guardian correspondent in Batticaloa, purportedly to arrest him, and threatened his family when it was discovered he was not at home.

Police forcibly entered the home of journalist S Nilanthan on Thursday night at around 9.10pm. Since Nilanthan was not at the house, police threatened his family and warned them to tell Nilanthan to appear at Eravur police station the following morning.

A former Sri Lankan intelligence officer, who had previously evaded arrest over the abduction and disappearance of 11 youths and the assassination of an MP, has been released on bail this week.

Lieutenant Commander Chandana Prasad Hettiarachchi alias 'Navy Sampath' was in remand custody  over  the abduction of the eleven Tamil youth from 2008 to 2009, who were held in navy bases at Trincomalee and Colombo before being almost certainly murdered. He was also wanted in connection with the 2006 murder of Tamil National Alliance parliamentarian Nadarajah Raviraj.

The head of the Sri Lankan army warned that the military must be prepared to face “any internal or external threats” in an address to troops on New Year’s Day.

Sri Lanka’s president Gotabaya Rajapaksa vowed to “protect and nurture the Buddha Sasana” in an address to parliament this morning, where he called for changes to be made to the Sri Lankan constitution in order to safeguard “security, sovereignty, stability and integrity”.

Sri Lanka’s Tamils who are “concentrated in the country’s north say the area still suffers from a lack of development, despite promises by its new President Gotabaya Rajapaksa,” Charles Stratford reports for Al Jazeera.

Families of the disappeared protested outside the Jaffna office of the paramilitary organisation EPDP on Thursday, calling for the arrest of its leader, current Sri Lankan cabinet minister Douglas Devananda.

The Sri Lankan military “are trying to destroy evidence and intimidate the witnesses" said the wife of a disappeared journalist, as nine Sri Lankan soldiers face charges over his abduction.

Sri Lanka’s Terrorism Investigation Division (TID) has launched an investigation into the use of a local authority owned water tanker to water the streets of Nallur at the end week-long memorial events to Lt Col Thileepan.

On this day 14 years ago, five Tamil students were summarily executed by Sri Lanka's Special Task Force, whilst they spent an afternoon on the beach in Trincomalee.

To date no one has been held accountable for the murder.

The case – known as the 'Trinco 5' – remains one of the highest profile killings in Sri Lanka to receive international attention, listed in 2014 by the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights' report on the island as one of four ‘emblematic cases’ of the government's failure to ensure accountability and having been raised repeatedly in international forums.