Missing Since July, Girl Found in Cave With Two-Month-Old Baby

Missing Since July, Girl Found in Cave With Two-Month-Old Baby

By Jaffna Monitor Staff A 15-year-old girl who disappeared from her home in the hills of Kandy District in July has been found living in a forest cave with a baby girl about two months old, police said. She had given birth there without a doctor or midwife. Officers from the Ududumbara Police found the two after noticing that a young man from the area was buying far more rice each day than one person could eat. They followed him into uninhabited forest on the western slopes of the Knuckles ran


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Our Reporter

Hakeem Blames Bimal Rathnayake for Two-Year Delay at Kankesanthurai Port

Hakeem Blames Bimal Rathnayake for Two-Year Delay at Kankesanthurai Port

COLOMBO: Rauff Hakeem, the leader of the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, accused Bimal Rathnayake in Parliament on Saturday of holding up the Indian-funded reconstruction of Kankesanthurai harbour for two years. He also said the minister seemed upset that the project was now going ahead. “Two years have been wasted,” Mr. Hakeem said, addressing Mr. Rathnayake. “The delay in building the Kankesanthurai harbour is because of you.” Mr. Rathnayake, the Leader of the House and Minister of Transport, Hig


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Our Reporter

Shanakiyan Says Budget Ignores Tamil Question and Makes Struggling Families Wait

Shanakiyan Says Budget Ignores Tamil Question and Makes Struggling Families Wait

By Jaffna Monitor Staff Colombo, 14 November 2026 Shanakiyan Rasamanickam, the parliamentary group leader of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi, told Parliament on Friday that the government was celebrating higher reserves while ordinary families struggled with rising prices. He said the 2027 budget did not address the Tamil national question at all. Mr. Rasamanickam, a member of Parliament for Batticaloa, spoke on the first day of the budget debate. He said a budget speech should do more than s


Our Reporter

Our Reporter

A Mass Grave From the JVP’s Bloody Past Now Tests Its Government

A Mass Grave From the JVP’s Bloody Past Now Tests Its Government

Relatives of young people who disappeared during the state’s crackdown on a Marxist uprising in the late 1980s asked the High Court in Matale on Wednesday to revive a judicial inquiry into a mass grave of 155 bodies. The grave was found on the grounds of the town’s main hospital in 2012, and the case has been dormant since 2015. The application was filed by the attorneys Himali Kularatne and Lakmal Sooriyagoda on behalf of the Families of the Disappeared, an organisation of relatives of people


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Our Reporter

UNAFRAID AND UNBOWED

The Long Warning: Inside the Intelligence Trail That Preceded Easter Bombings
Zahran Hashim and other men pledge allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi before the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks.

The Long Warning: Inside the Intelligence Trail That Preceded Easter Bombings

By Aruliniyan Mahalingam JAFFNA — On the evening of April 20, 2019, a man at his home in Puthukudiyiruppu took a WhatsApp call from an Indian police officer. The call came sometime between 5:15 and 5:45 p.m. The officer asked him an odd question: where were Sri Lanka's major churches? The man named the ones that came to mind. The Madhu shrine. St. Anthony's at Kochchikade in Colombo. The Tewatta church at Ragama. Then the officer told him that Zahran Hashim's group was preparing to strike Cat


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Archbishop, Archbishop, why hast thou forsaken us in our hour of sorrow and slaughter?

Archbishop, Archbishop, why hast thou forsaken us in our hour of sorrow and slaughter?

"Cry aloud, spare not, lift up thy voice like a trumpet, and shew my people their transgression, and the house of Jacob their sins." - Isaiah 58:1 His Eminence Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo and chief shepherd of the Catholic flock in all of Sri Lanka, has recently marked fifty years in the sacred priesthood. As the highest-ranking prelate whose dominion spans the entire island, he now stands as a mighty voice crying for justice, calling upon the nations of the earth for interv


Kaniyan Pungundran

Kaniyan Pungundran

Jaffna Library Burning: The Day They Burned the buddha and his dhamma

Jaffna Library Burning: The Day They Burned the buddha and his dhamma

Why South Asia Reveres Books-and Fears Their Destruction Irrespective of religion, across the Indian subcontinent, books have long held an exalted status. In the indigenous spiritual traditions that emerged from this land-Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism-knowledge is not merely valued; it is venerated in the highest order. In homes, temples, and schools across the region, people treat books with profound reverence-never touching them with their feet, and if done accidentally, offering a


Aruliniyan Mahalingam

Aruliniyan Mahalingam

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Sri Lankan Doctor in Australia Suspended for Three Months for Harassing Medical Student
Dr. Widana Pushkara Epa was suspended for three months for sexually harassing a medical student at his clinic. Photo: Supplied

Sri Lankan Doctor in Australia Suspended for Three Months for Harassing Medical Student

By Jaffna Monitor News Desk A tribunal in the Australian state of Victoria has suspended a Sri Lankan doctor from practice for three months after finding that he sexually harassed a medical student who was on placement at his general practice clinic in regional Victoria in 2021. The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal imposed the penalty on Tuesday on Dr. Widana Pushkara Epa, a general practitioner in his late 50s who studied medicine in Belarus and moved to Australia in 2009, The Noti


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Our Reporter

Thevakantha Sarma, former EROS member, dies in Berlin at 55

Thevakantha Sarma, former EROS member, dies in Berlin at 55

Thevakantha Sarma died in Berlin, where he had lived for many years. He was a former member of the Tamil militant group EROS who later taught mathematics, worked as a nurse in Germany, and encouraged young Tamil writers. He was 55. Known to friends as Sarma and to his family as Kantha, he was born on 10 October 1971 and grew up in Selvanayagapuram, Trincomalee. He was the second son of Shanmugaratnasarma Jegatheeswara Sarma and Sebastiampillai Jesiamma. What happened to his elder brother shape


Our Reporter

Our Reporter

TID Questions Wife of Critically Ill Tamil Politician and Serves Court Summons

TID Questions Wife of Critically Ill Tamil Politician and Serves Court Summons

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka: Officers of Sri Lanka’s Terrorism Investigation Division went to the home of M.K. Sivajilingam, a veteran Tamil politician now in intensive care, questioned his wife at length and left a summons ordering him to appear before a court in Mullaitivu next month. The officers visited the family’s house in Valvettithurai, on the northern coast of the Jaffna Peninsula, on Tuesday. They recorded a statement from Mr. Sivajilingam’s wife. Then they served the summons, which requires hi


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Our Reporter

Budget Skips Palaly Airport and Kankesanthurai Port, Pledges to Resettle 13,000 War-Displaced Families

Budget Skips Palaly Airport and Kankesanthurai Port, Pledges to Resettle 13,000 War-Displaced Families

By Jaffna Monitor Staff Colombo, 12 November 2026 The 2027 budget that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake presented to Parliament on Thursday sets out plans for airports at Katunayake, Ratmalana, Mattala, Sigiriya and China Bay, and for ports at Colombo, Galle and Trincomalee. It makes no mention of Jaffna International Airport at Palaly or the harbour at Kankesanthurai, the Northern Province’s two direct links to southern India. Both projects have been promised for years. In 2024, the Indian


Jaffna Monitor

Jaffna Monitor

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