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after he paid a ransom. According to the man, a jeweler who wished to remain
anonymous, he started getting threatening phone calls in April 2006, sometimes
from people who said they were from the Karuna group. They demanded that he
transfer one million rupees ($US 8,946) into a bank account. 101 About one month
after the first call, he was walking from his shop in Colombo when a group of men
forced him to get into a white van. He explained,
At 5:30 p.m. I went to my car. There’s a bar between my car and my
shop. There were two men, ages between 35 and 40. When they saw
me they said, ‘We’re from CID [Criminal Investigation Division of the
police]. Please show us your ID.’ I gave it. They spoke Tamil but with a
Batticaloa accent. They said, ‘Our boss is there, so show him your ID.’ I
didn’t ask for theirs. When I went there, immediately a white van came
about 20 meters in front of my car. As soon as I got there, the sliding
door of the van opened and some people inside pulled me in. I was
shocked and I realized that I was trapped by some abductors. They
said, ‘Don’t panic or we’ll shoot you.’ Immediately they put a white
cloth over my eyes…. I don’t know exactly but more than five people
were in the van.
According to the man, the van drove for about four hours, stopping occasionally. The
man thought they were stopping at checkpoints, because the person in the front said,
“Hello, how are you?” in Sinhala. Eventually they put him in a room and, after 10
minutes, a man arrived. He said, “We had already instructed you to pay and you did
not, so that is why we abducted you. If you don’t pay we’ll kill you and even your
family won’t be able to see the body because we’ll dump it in the jungle.”
The next day the man’s captors made him call his brother. They told the brother that
he had to pay money to save the man’s life. The following day they put the man back
into a vehicle and drove him for about three hours. They let him out at a bus stop and
told him he could go home, but they warned him not to tell anyone. The man realized
101 Human Rights Watch interview with formerly abducted Tamil businessman, Colombo, October 2006.
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Human Rights Watch August 2007