In 2002 Sena Suraweera was the first respondent in a fundamental rights application filed by Gerard Perera. Perera complained that several police officers at the Wattala Police Station severely tortured him to the extent that he suffered renal failure.
The case before the Supreme Court revealed that Perera was arrested simply because he had the name “Gerard.” It was clearly a careless arrest. The Supreme Court found Inspector Suraweera and three other police officers to have violated the fundamental rights of Gerard Perera by illegal arrest, detention and torture.
As a respondent, Suraweera filed an affidavit stating that the arrest and detention were carried out under his direction.
After the verdict in this case, the attorney general filed an indictment against seven police officers from the Wattala Police Station, charging them under the Convention against Torture Act, Act No. 22 of 1994. This carries a mandatory sentence of seven year’s rigorous imprisonment and a hefty fine. The seventh accused of that case was Inspector Suraweera. However, he wrote a letter to the attorney general denying responsibility for what was in his earlier affidavit, and blaming an assistant superintendent of police above him for the arrest and all that followed.
For some reason the attorney general decided to believe the contents of this letter and to disbelieve the affidavit that had been filed before the Supreme Court. He made application to the High Court of Negombo to remove Inspector Suraweera from the list of accused.
This action would have brought immense relief and happiness to the inspector, as the threat of jail disappeared, together with whatever responsibility he owed for the affidavit he filed in the Supreme Court.
A number of years later Inspector Suraweera was called as a witness by the six accused policemen who were still facing trial at the Negombo High Court. Here too, giving evidence from the witness box, Suraweera disowned the affidavit that had been filed in his name before the Supreme Court as the first respondent in the fundamental rights case. The versions of his story were several and each contradicted the other. One version was that he signed a set of blank papers and therefore had no knowledge of the contents of the affidavit.
Later the Registrar of the Supreme Court produced the file of the case before the High Court and when the relevant affidavit was shown to him, Inspector Suraweera denied that the signature was his. He went further, denying repeatedly the contents of the affidavit in which he had originally accepted overall responsibility for the arrest and detention of Gerard Perera.
The deputy solicitor general who prosecuted the case brought this serious matter of the denial of the veracity of an affidavit filed to the Supreme Court, which would constitute a serious act of perjury as well as an act of contempt, to the notice of the High Court. Since Inspector Suraweera was a senior state officer with over 30 years of experience as a police officer, the seriousness of the act should have been evident.
The inspector, by denying responsibility for the affidavit, was relieved from the High Court trial and was also able to give a completely different version of events to the Negombo High Court.
Of course the unhappy party is the victim’s family. The victim had been arrested purely on mistaken identity, tortured and latter killed for daring to complain about it and wanting to give evidence against police officers before the High Court.
From – Sri Lanka’s happy lawbreakers-By BASIL FERNANDO
