Anne Ranaweera was still in bed when a group of police officers, three in civil clothing and one in police uniform, barged into her house in Pamunugama, forced her into a jeep and took her to the Bopitiya/Pamunugama police station.
The freelance journalist and ancestral medicine practitioner was awakened by her six-year-old son who was shaken upon seeing the angry crowd at their verandah on August 13 morning.
The group charged into the house with wooden poles and shouted at Ranaweera. They wanted her to go with them to the station.
The officer in uniform, identified as SI Perera, had given orders to the others to video the incident. This included Ranaweera still in her nightdress.
“I asked them not to record me that way. I then asked them if they had a document to show why they were taking me to the police station,” Ranaweera told the Sunday Observer.
They did not possess a document. Ranaweera refused to leave her house till a Woman Police Constable (WPC) came.
She then asked to go to the bathroom to change her clothing. From inside the bathroom, she made several calls.
One was to the president of the medical association she represented, Fr. S. Kurukulasooriya.
Wooden poles and metal chairs
 Anne Ranaweera |
When the WPC arrived, Ranaweera was pushed into the police jeep and taken to the police station. Ranaweera’s mother, Daisy Alwis, tried to stop a police officer from pushing her daughter and she was assaulted with a wooden pole.
Ranaweera did not foresee, even in her wildest dreams, what she was about to undergo at the police station.
“SI Perera hit me with a metal chair. I lost balance and fell on the chair that was behind me. He then kicked me,” she said.
After Father Kurukulasooriya intervened, the OIC of the station let her go back home. They did not have a recorded complaint against her. Their justification for the brutal treatment were five phone calls they received from residents complaining about her medical clinic.
The incident left Ranaweera badly wounded. She sustained injuries to the face, neck and leg, and was admitted to the Colombo North Teaching Hospital. The OIC visited her at the hospital and asked her to settle the case without pressing any charges. She refused.
Her plight did not end there. Last Saturday (17) there was an attack at her house. The windows of the house were shattered. No action was taken by the police with regard to the incident.
“When it is a case of a writer’s fictional work, he is immediately charged under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Act. That promptness is not reflected when the police is at fault,” Sameera Perera of the Centre for Society and Religion said, referring to the arrest of fiction writer Shakthika Sathkumara, at a press conference held early last week.
Also speaking at the press conference, human rights advocate with the Colombo-based Inform Human Rights Documentation Centre Ruki Fernando pointed out that torture is absolutely prohibited by both international and domestic law. He further showed that the police have also violated the Assistance to and Protection of Victims of Crime and Witnesses Act.
Fernando said Ranaweera and her family should be given immediate security till the case is concluded.
Perera called for an immediate probe and justice to Ranaweera’s case. “We have only four more months to seek justice,” he said, denoting the upcoming Presidential Elections.
Police brutality on the rise
This was not the first incident this year where a police officer assaulted a journalist. A Jaffna-based journalist was attacked by a police officer attached to the Kokkilai police station in Mullaitivu while he was reporting on a story.
Ranaweera’s case is also among many where suspects were assaulted while in police custody, something which is also on the rise, according to the Janasansadaya (The People’s Forum that records and reports complaints of police brutality).
Two of the recent cases reported to Janasansadaya were from Panadura and Uragasmanhandiya. In the former, a 46-year-old father of one, a fishmonger, was arrested on the 15 of this month by the police when he was at a house owned by a famous drug dealer in the area. He was assaulted. The victim has abandoned the case against the police after he was threatened.
In another case, a man in his early twenties was hung by his hands at the police station and brutally beaten. He has filed a Fundamental Rights petition at the Supreme Court. “Police brutality is rampant in Sri Lanka. The issue is that victims rarely seek justice because they don’t have a place to report the incidents,” alleged Secretary of ‘Janasansadaya’ Chitral Perera.
He also accused the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission (SLHRC) for being sluggish when seeking justice for such cases.
Ranaweera has filed a complaint at the SLHRC and forwarded her letter to the Acting IGP Chandana Wickramaratne.
Seeduwa police are probing the incident.