12 August 2005
Relangi Selvarajah
Shooting
Popular Tamil broadcaster Relangi Selvarajah and her husband, a political activist, were killed by unidentified gunmen in Colombo on the same day that Sri Lanka's foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar was assassinated.
The attackers shot dead Selvarajah, 44, and her husband Senathurai in the office where they ran a travel agency. Police have made no arrests. Sri Lanka's Sunday Times reported that the LTTE had criticized Selvarajah for broadcasting anti-LTTE programs.
Selvarajah was a radio and television host for twenty years, presenting news programs for the state-run Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC) and recently for the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation, according to the Free Media Movement, a local press freedom organization. Local newspapers reported that Selvarajah also produced the SLBC program "Ithaya Veenai", a program known for criticizing the LTTE, and allegedly funded by the opposition Tamil political party the Eelam People's Democratic Party.
Sri Lanka's Daily Mirror quoted police as saying that they suspected the couple may have been murdered because of Ms. Selvarajah's anti-LTTE programs. But their connection to PLOTE also raised the possibility that their killing may have been part of a larger cycle of violence, and could be connected to the April murder of well-known pro-LTTE Tamil journalist Dharamaratnam Sivaram. Sivaram was a former member of PLOTE who defected to the LTTE.
