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Activist vows to fight on after surviving abduction in Sri Lanka
Agence France Presse - April 12, 2012
Premakumar Gunaratnam, 42, a Sri Lankan-born Australian citizen, said security forces grabbed him from his home near Colombo and had planned to kill him, but they were forced to free him after international pressure.
"I believed they were going to kill me after they took me away at gun point," Gunaratnam told reporters after he was deported to Australia. "They blind-folded me, tied my wrists and legs and sexually tortured me."
Gunaratnam told reporters at a video conference at his office in the capital Colombo that he believed members of the security forces were involved in the kidnapping and his account of the ordeal was similar to scores of abductions in recent months.
"I am lucky to be alive and one of the very few to have survived an abduction by security forces. But, this is not a question about me, but about democracy and human rights in Sri Lanka."
"We must unite to restore democracy and we must include members of the security forces. There are officers who believe they are being forced by politicians to carry out illegal acts," he said. He said he survived because the Australian High Commission and international rights groups pressed for his release.
Government spokesman and acting Media Minister Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena denied security forces were involved in Gunaratnam's abduction.
He went missing as he prepared to launch an anti-government Marxist party, according to fellow activists. The women's leader of his new Frontline Socialist Party, Dimuthu Attygalle, was abducted the day before. However, both were freed on the same day at two separate locations and Gunaratnam was eventually deported.
The FSP is a breakaway faction of the People's Liberation Front which led uprisings in 1971 and 1987. Almost 100,000 died in both, but Gunaratnam said they had no plans to take up arms.
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