My son, Hemantha Chandrasiri was a university student when he disappeared. On 12 October 1989, my son and my wife were at our home in Horagalmulla because the universities were closed. Around 4.30 pm, they were gardening when two people arrived and asked for him. They wanted his help to find an address. He told that he did not know the address but they forced him to come with them. He refused and when those two tried to take our son away, my wife started to scream for help. One of the men pulled a pistol to intimidate my wife into silence and pushed Hemantha into a jeep. As they shuffled him in, he yelled that those people were union students at the university opposite his one. My wife had run behind them asking them to release him. Two boys from the neighborhood had tried to trail them on a motorbike but had lost them at a junction further up the road. I was not at home when the incident took place. When I rushed home after hearing, the incident we and some neighbors started searching for Hemantha. My eldest son made a complaint at the Divulapitiya Police Station but they never conducted an inquiry. We visited several army camps such as Racecourse, Naiwala, and Boosa, but we received the same response every time: “No one is here by that name.” Our relatives visited Essalla where dead and burned bodies were dumped into a pit continuously but we never heard or found him. We did, however, find the owner of the jeep which was used to abduct my son. He revealed that his vehicle was taken by men in civilian clothes in army uniform for a couple of days and then returned. In 1994, I found an article written by Member of Parliament, Patali Champika Ranawaka. He described that he had noted my son as an active member of a student movement linked to the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). He further said, while my son advocated for the JVP at the start, he later became a fierce critic of the party’s objectives and behavior. In his article, Champika wrote that, when Champika heard my son had been abducted, he wanted to find him. The next day after he heard the news of the abduction, just after visiting a Buddhist monk in Colombo, to inquire about my son, Champika was also abducted and kept him also for a long period at Colombo University which was used to function as a torture chamber. Champika wrote, once he heard Hemantha’s voice calling out another detainee but because Champika was blindfolded, he could not visually identify Hemantha. Another detainee Sarath Wijewardene, a convenor of IUSM who was also held there and tortured, had told Champika that Hemantha had been beheaded before his eyes, in that camp. However, my wife and I held onto our hope. After the troubled period was over when we attended a remembrance held at the University of Colombo for the disappeared from the Colombo Campus, we both fainted because we saw a photo of our son, there on the list of the disappeared from the university. As my wife was taken to the hospital and only returned about two hours later, we missed the opportunity of meeting Champika, who was also there. We could never contact the people who could have provided us with more information about our son’s time in the torture camp. So we were forced to believe that our son had been murdered. Since the incident, every government has failed to respond to our questions. Who killed or disappeared our son? Why did they kill or disappear our child who was only 26 years old?. Testimony by B. Carolis Silva, Hemantha Chandrasiri’s Father.