“I have no wish to return since the individuals who I believe to be responsible are still in positions of power…”
Fifteen days after the attack on Wickrematunge, it was Tennakoon’s turn. As he drove to work with his wife near the capital Colombo, a man approached his car at about 6:40 a.m. “I thought he was trying to talk to me,” says Tennakoon, in an interview with Global Journalist.
Instead, the man smashed the side window of the car with an iron bar and started attacking Tennakoon. Three other armed men on two motorbikes also joined the attack with knives, wooden rods and iron bars, breaking the windshield and the side windows. Tennakoon’s face and hands were bleeding. From the passenger seat, his wife flung herself on top of him in a desperate effort to shield him from the blows.
“[We had] nothing to do, anything,” he recalled. “They also tried to break my neck, but they missed it; otherwise I would have been dead.”
The assailants fled, and Tennakoon was taken to a hospital. Three weeks later, he and his wife fled to the United States, where they have lived for the last nine years.
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