Dr Kasipillai Manoharan, the father of Ragihar Manoharan, one of five Tamil students summarily executed by Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force (STF) in Trincomalee in 2006, has died in exile at the age of 74, without ever seeing justice delivered for his son’s murder.
On 2 January 2006, Ragihar, aged 20, was on the Trincomalee beachfront with four friends when they were executed at point-blank range by STF officers. The killing, now known as the Trinco 5 massacre, sparked outrage across the North-East and international condemnation.
To this day, no one has been held accountable.
Dr Manoharan was among the first to rush to the scene after hearing his son’s final desperate phone call – “Daddy, the forces are around me.” Stopped by soldiers and prevented from reaching his son, he later found Ragihar’s body in the mortuary, with a gunshot wound to his head.
Despite threats, intimidation and bribes offered by senior Sri Lankan politicians, Dr Manoharan refused to be silenced.
In the weeks following his testimony to a magistrate, his family home was attacked, his practice forced shut, and his life repeatedly threatened. He was eventually forced into exile, where he spent nearly two decades campaigning tirelessly for justice, often addressing events at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and demanding an independent international investigation.
His activism made him a target. Successive Sri Lankan governments attempted to buy his silence, offering him housing in Colombo and promises of protection, but Dr Manoharan rejected every offer. “I will not rest till the people behind this crime are charged,” he declared in 2019.
International human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch repeatedly highlighted his courage. Amnesty’s Secretary General Salil Shetty said in 2012, “Of the crowd of people on the seafront that night, Ragihar’s father was the only one prepared to speak out. Others were too scared.”
The Trinco 5 case was listed by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2014 as one of four “emblematic cases” that epitomised Sri Lanka’s entrenched culture of impunity. It was also noted in leaked US diplomatic cables, where Basil Rajapaksa privately admitted that the STF was responsible for the murders. Yet despite arrests of STF officers in 2013, no prosecutions were ever brought.
In 2020, Dr Manoharan’s wife, who had stood by him through years of harassment, also died in exile. Now, with his passing, both parents of Ragihar have died without seeing those responsible held to account.
Civil society in Trincomalee continues to mark the killings each year with memorial events, but justice for the Trinco 5 remains elusive.
For Tamils, Dr Manoharan’s death is another painful reminder of how Colombo’s refusal to prosecute perpetrators of mass atrocities leaves families waiting for decades, only to die without redress.
TAMIL GUARDIAN
