Stop-Torture-Report

(Witness 42)
Some witness were detained in Manik Farm, identified by informer and then
taken elsewhere to be tortured. A young mother was taken from Manik Farm to
a nearby army camp; she described being sexually abused in front of her
toddler who was in the same room. Both of them had been stripped naked and
the child was screaming in terror:
“I did not tell the solicitor or the Home Office because they are men but there
was sexual torture. They were touching me all the time – every time they asked
me a question they had to touch. It was mostly touching my breasts as I was
forced to kneel on the ground. Sometimes they touched my breasts with their
guns. I was kicked with boots and my child was present all time and always
crying with hunger so they kicked him too. “
(Witness 98)
This constitutes torture of both mother and child. When asked if she’d been
raped, the witness was too distressed to answer but buried her face in her
hands. She said she was detained in the same cell for several weeks and
tortured, including sexually, every day in front of her child.
Other women also described being identified in Manik Farm and taken to a
nearby location to be tortured and/or sexually abused 53 . One, a former LTTE
member, said she saw 150 female and 150 male informers identified in Manik
Farm Zone 4 by informers on approximately 22 May 2009. They were divided
into groups according to how long they’d been in the LTTE. She and 4 other
women were identified as long serving members of the LTTE and were driven
about half an hour a way to a camp in the jungle where the buildings were
constructed from aluminum sheets on cement flooring. She was tied up, forced
to drink urine, raped and tortured during months of detention.
The victims in Manik Farm were not only women. This witness knows the names
of two of the men who tortured him:
53
WS36 and Witness D.
73