Just a few hours after Lasantha Wickrematunge was shot dead in a busy Colombo street last week his elder brother, Lal, rushed to the pioneering journalist's home.Lasantha, the editor of Sri Lanka's The Sunday Leader newspaper, had warned Lal a few days earlier that the Government would try to kill him, and told him about a cupboard containing all his sensitive documents.
Rifling through it, Lal piled the papers into a plastic bag. Only later, as he read through them, did he realise that one was the handwritten draft of an obituary that Lasantha had prepared for himself, explicitly accusing the Government of assassinating him.
That extraordinary obituary, published in the The Sunday Leader, is now making waves around the world and spotlighting the assault on the media that has accompanied Sri Lanka's military campaign against the Tamil Tiger rebels since 2006.
“When finally I am killed, it will be the Government that kills me,” said the obituary entitled And Then They Came For Me. “Murder has become the primary tool whereby the state seeks to control the organs of liberty. Today it is the journalists, tomorrow it will be the judges.”
Lal told The Times that Leader staff had updated the obituary and added the title, but that 60 to 70 per cent of it was Lasantha's, including those ominous lines. “There were no material changes,” he said. “He'd told me he felt this was the time they would go for him, during the euphoria about the military progress.”
Under President Rajapaska the Army has made unprecedented gains against the Tigers, whose 25-year struggle for an ethnic Tamil homeland has claimed more than 70,000 lives.
The army captured Kilinochchi, the Tigers' capital, on January 2, and is now on the brink of a conventional military victory as troops close in on the rebels' last outpost in Mullaitivu.
Lasantha, however, was one of a small group of critics who accused the Government of systematically eroding civil liberties since a 2002 truce unravelled four years later.
A member of the ethnic Sinhalese majority, he also criticised the Government for failing to find a lasting political solution to address the Tamil minority's concerns.
“He was a lone dissenting voice,” said Sonali Samarasinghe, Lasantha's second wife, whom he married three weeks ago. “He was perceived as denigrating the Government's so-called victory.”
Lasantha knew the risks: he had survived other attacks, including the burning of his newspaper's printing press in 2007, and was used to regular death threats. Dilrukshi Handunnetti, the Leader's investigations editor, showed The Times an envelope that he received three days before he died.
It contained half a page of his newspaper with a message in red paint daubed across a critical story on Kilinochchi's capture. “If you continue to write this, you'll be killed,” the message said.
“Throw it in the bin - who cares?” she remembers him saying. “I think he got a kick out of it.”
He was equally defiant the morning he died when he realised that he was being followed while driving to his house from his ex-wife's. His wife begged him not to drive himself to work but he insisted.
“Fear never crossed his mind,” she said. Only in the final moments before the attack did he call a doctor, who treated him and the President, to try to get a message to his erstwhile friend.
Sonali said the doctor told her later that he had called the President but could not reach him for 45 minutes. By that time Lasantha had been shot in the head at point-blank range.
“That's why he was found with his mobile phone in his hand,” said Sonali. “We were living our lives - that's what so hard. One moment we were so happy, and then there's nothing.”
Before his death, Lasantha had been locked in court battles over his stories with politicians and officials, including Gotabaya Rajapaska - the Defence Secretary and the President's brother.
Sri Lankan journalists are wary of specifying who they think killed Lasantha but Mangala Samaraweera, an opposition politician, voiced the widespread suspicion that it was the Defence Ministry or the Army. “It's an open secret that there's been a killer squad in the Defence Ministry for the last two years,” said Mr Samaraweera, who was Foreign Minister until 2006.
He, like many, questioned how Lasantha's killers could arrive and escape on motorbikes, carrying firearms, in a city with police checkpoints on almost every street. “Sri Lanka is going through one of its darkest phases,” he said. “The Government is using this war to establish an autocratic regime.”
Mr Rajapaska, who was friends with Lasantha for years, denies any role in his murder and has pledged to bring the perpetrators to justice, blaming it on “forces that will go to the farthest extremes in using terror and criminality to damage our social fabric and bring disrepute to the country”.
Journalists, rights activists and diplomats say that the President is guilty, at best, of tolerating such attacks. At least 14 journalists and media workers have been killed here since 2006, according to Amnesty International. Another 20 have fled overseas after death threats.
Last Tuesday gunmen attacked the headquarters of MTV, a private broadcaster critical of the Government, and destroyed its control room with grenades. None of these cases has been solved so far.
The United States, the European Union and other international bodies have all expressed concern but diplomats admit that they have little sway over the Government.
Jurgen Weerth, the German Ambassador, summed up the frustration in a eulogy at Lasantha's funeral, for which he was reprimanded by Sri Lanka's Foreign Ministry. “Maybe we should have spoken before this,” he said. “Today it is too late.”
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