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in and out of the detention site, so they never saw the location in which they<br />
were held. They were driven for a couple of hours and kept in a windowless cell<br />
on their own, never encountering other detainees but often hearing voices<br />
screaming in Tamil. In interrogations they were asked about their involvement<br />
with the LTTE, even if that was only a few weeks as forced recruit or child<br />
soldier at the height of the war. They were forced to sign confessions in Sinhala<br />
– a language they could not understand and were fingerprinted and<br />
photographed. Release was secured after a relative paid the ransom to the<br />
officials holding him. The interrogators wore a mixture of army uniforms and<br />
plain clothes; sometimes they introduced themselves as CID, sometimes as<br />
members of other branches of the security forces. None of the perpetrators<br />
made any attempt to hide their own identities from their victims.<br />
The connection between the security forces and the human smugglers who<br />
arranged false passports, exit from Sri Lanka and travel abroad, often through<br />
multiple transit countries, can be blatant, as in this case:<br />
“…the TID [Terrorism Investigation Division] man told me how to get to Europe;<br />
he said to get me out of Sri Lanka. If I went back to Northern Sri Lanka he said<br />
he would arrest me again. They were all in it together. My father paid 25 lakhs<br />
just to get me out. The police, the agent, the TID officer all shared it.”<br />
(Witness 119)<br />
Two witnesses tortured in 2015 described the experience of transiting multiple<br />
countries with the agent as very frightening. Witness 120 said he was kept<br />
indoors, hidden in a room, by the agent for two months without knowing where<br />
he was. Witness 122 had a similar experience with the smuggler:<br />
“The agent gave a contact number for emergencies so I contacted him and he<br />
asked me to wait in a place and after some hours he picked me up and took me<br />
to France and kept me there for many days and I was not allowed to contact<br />
anyone. He was very hard towards me. I was kept in a room in a house and not<br />
allowed to go out. I asked him many times where are we and where are we<br />
going. He threatened me that if I didn’t cooperate he would send me back to<br />
Sri Lanka.”<br />
40
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