Nihal Perera

On 5 July 2013, Nihal Perera woke up, as he usually did, at the crack of dawn. He hoped it would be a productive day.

As the superintendent of Noori Estate, a sprawling tea plantation nestled in the mountains of Deraniyagala in Sri Lanka’s Kegalle District, one of Perera’s tasks involved gathering firewood from the estate’s reservation. But on that fateful day, when the 72-year-old set out with his guards to inspect the property and collect wood to supply the factory’s constant demand, a mob lay in wait to ambush him. Not only would they end up massacring him with shaving knives, swords and poles, but they would go on to display his flayed, naked body across town in the back of a pickup truck, in broad daylight.

Perera had been at odds with his murderers for many months leading up to his death. The mob was led by the chairman of the Deraniyagala municipality, Anil Champika, also known as Atha Kota (Sinhala for ‘short hand’ – allegedly after he lost his left forearm when a homemade gun he was carrying went off by accident).

Champika and his nephew, Amila Wijesinghe, had taken control of Noori Estate, grabbing the assets and living lavishly off the profits. Political patronage and the backing of members of the ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party allowed Champika to plunder the estate with impunity; even the police were afraid to intervene. Perera, however, fearlessly battled the gang’s pilfering of the estate on behalf of the workers, who for generations had depended on it.

According to IP Silva, one of the police officers who investigated Perera’s murder, Champika and his mob had already assaulted the estate superintendent in February that year after he had protested against the gang’s monopoly of supplying firewood to the factory. Perera’s leg was fractured in the assault and he was threatened with a warning never to come back. After his wound had healed, however, Perera returned to the estate, under the protection of security guards assigned to him by Walter Bay, the American company that officially owned Noori, vowing to protect it.

On 5 July, at 9 a.m., Perera alighted from his pickup truck for a routine inspection of the estate, while two of his guards waited in the vehicle. It was then that Wijesinghe led a gang towards the parked vehicle. Perera, realizing something was amiss, ran for cover in a nearby abandoned house, while onlookers began to throw stones at the mob of nearly 15 people, at great personal risk, in an attempt to get them to disperse.

A man who wished not to be named revealed that he was stripped naked, tied to a lamppost and lashed incessantly because he had thrown stones at Champika’s men. ‘They told me I would be freed if I gave them my sister. I refused. I was tied to the lamppost from 10 p.m. that night until 10 a.m. the following morning,’ he said.

According to testimony by an estate worker, one of Champika’s men hit Perera on the head with a steel pole. As he fell to his knees, Perera was attacked with a sword. He was then taken to the officers’ quarters, where the mob took turns beating him with metal poles and attacking him with sticks and swords.

Another worker, who survived the assault, said that Perera, who appeared lifeless, was then hauled into his own car. When his guards were made to get into the same vehicle, they saw that the superintendent had been beaten senseless and would probably not survive the rest of the ordeal. The three men were then driven to a more isolated location, about 500 metres from the estate. On their way, the mob stopped at a barber shop and took some sharp shaving knives.

Although Champika had planned the attack, he came only for the kill. He ordered his thugs to continue assaulting Perera. ‘Sir was groaning in pain, it was hard for us to watch, because there was nothing we could do,’ one of the estate workers testified. When Champika and Wijesinghe were satisfied with the work the mob had done, they left the scene, threatening the workers not to report the incident to the police. Thus many of the witnesses who eventually testified before the courts said that they had intentionally omitted parts of their initial statements to the police out of fear that they would suffer the same fate as Perera.