On the morning of 3 August, the shops in Kattankudy closed their shutters for two hours. No announcement was made over loudspeakers, no procession moved through the streets. The Muslim-majority coastal town, strung along the A4 highway between the Batticaloa Lagoon and the Bay of Bengal, simply went quiet – a stillness that has settled over the town every year for 36 years, a way of carrying its grief without ceremony.
Inside the mosque, the walls tell the story that the town no longer needs to speak aloud. The plaster has never been repaired. Bullet pockmarks run in ragged lines across the inner walls, sitting alongside the daily rhythms of prayer – a permanent, unspoken testimony that worshippers kneel beside each time they bow their heads to the floor.
‘They commanded us to go inside’
On the evening of 3 August 1990, during Isha prayers, armed men entered two of Kattankudy’s mosques disguised as ordinary worshippers. They opened fire with automatic weapons and detonated grenades among men and boys prostrate in prayer. More than 147 people were killed across the Meera Jumma and Hussainiya Mosques in an assault that remains one of the deadliest attacks on a place of worship in Sri Lanka’s civil war.
Rauff, who survived the massacre at Meera Jumma, recalled the days leading up to the attack and the moment the gunmen arrived: “The attack occurred on a Friday while we were gathered for prayers. I believe the incident was planned because we had been without power for 15 days leading up to that afternoon. When the attackers arrived, there were about 15 of them, and many were wearing uniforms. Because of their clothing, we were deceived into believing they were security forces who had come to protect us.
“They commanded us, ‘Go inside, go inside,’ and trusting them, we entered the mosque and joined the congregation for prayer rather than leading it. As we were praying, we were facing forward with our backs towards the entrance. The attackers then opened fire from behind us. The shooting continued for approximately 15 minutes. They used at least two guns and also used bombs during the assault.”
The toll at Meera Jumma Mosque alone was devastating. “Seventy-eight people were killed in our mosque alone, and another 25 were wounded,” Rauff said. “I personally lost 15 members of my family. This devastation touched every family in the area, with some losing up to 20 members, including children as young as six years old.”
Rauff himself was wounded and carried out by villagers after the attackers fled. Security forces, he said, did not arrive until around noon – reportedly out of fear that the gunmen were still in the area.
At the nearby Hussainiya Mosque, another survivor described how the attackers cornered worshippers and began firing through the windows. He escaped across the rooftop and survived.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) never claimed responsibility for the killings. Two decades later, in 2010, Tamil National Alliance Leader R. Sampanthan offered an apology to Sri Lanka’s Muslim community on the movement’s behalf. “I have to regret that the Tamil Tigers did not apologise for the mosque massacre,” he told the BBC Tamil service.
“That was a mistake, but we have no hesitation whatsoever in apologising to our Muslim brethren for what happened 20 years ago. One cannot explain all the actions of the Tamil Tigers. Some of their actions were quite irrational, and the mosque massacres were one such example of that.”
The killings in Kattankudy were part of a wider sequence of tit-for-tat violence between Tamil and Muslim communities that swept the Eastern Province between July and September 1990. Muslim community leaders describe the events of that period as amounting to ethnic cleansing, and many remain cautious, even today, about engaging publicly with Tamil political grievances – a caution rooted directly in the memory of that August.
‘Do not harm these little ones’
Some 32 km northwest of Ampara town, along the A24 road near Nuwaratenna, a very different kind of memorial stands at the edge of the forest: a temple complex built around a tragedy that struck the Sinhala Buddhist clergy.
On the morning of 2 June 1987, a bus carrying 41 monks and four laypeople from the Mahawapi Temple, bound for a pilgrimage to the Dalada Maligawa in Kandy, was intercepted by the LTTE near Aranthalawa. The passengers were forced off the bus and into the surrounding jungle.
Viharadhikari Ven. Pallewela Mahinda Thera, who now oversees the memorial temple at the site, recounted the events as they were passed down to him. The group’s Chief Prelate Ven. Hegoda Sri Indrasara Thera, was specifically targeted, he said, because his leadership and protection of the local community were seen as obstacles. As the bus was forced into the forest, the Chief Prelate stood and faced the attackers directly. Ven. Mahinda Thera quoted his final words: “I am not afraid to die. If you have anger, take it out on me; do not harm these little ones.”
The Chief Prelate was killed first. The younger monks – 30 of them novices – were killed in the attack that followed. Ven. Mahinda Thera described how some tried to survive by lying still among the bodies, still clutching their alms bowls. In total, 33 monks and four civilians died that day. Only two of the monks present survived: Ven. Andaulpatha Buddhasara, now confined to a wheelchair, and Ven. Aghurugatha Punnyasara, who remains in poor health.
Major memorial efforts at the site began only after the war ended in 2009, with the founding of the Sri Buddhasara Tripitaka Dharmayathana Pirivena. The temple operates without a formal lay committee, Ven. Mahinda Thera explained, relying instead on the spontaneous generosity of pilgrims. He is now overseeing the construction of the Aranthalawa Maha Saya, a stupa he describes as set to become “the largest stupa in the Digamadulla region, second only to the Deeghawapi Stupa”.
Yet the village around the temple has not shared equally in the post-war recovery narrative. Aranthalawa continues to face severe water shortages, with villagers coming to the temple itself to draw water, and the human-elephant conflict remains an unresolved and worsening problem. More than a decade after the war’s end, residents say, the border villages of the Eastern Province still contend with poverty and minimal infrastructure.
The Prawn farm massacre
Aranthalawa was not the only atrocity to strike the province in 1987. On 27 January that year, in the village of Kokkadichcholai in the Batticaloa District, at least 83 Tamil civilians were killed in what has come to be known as the ‘Prawn farm massacre’.
The killings have been attributed to the paramilitary element of the Police Department, the Special Task Force (STF), a charge the authorities have denied. This remains one of the earliest large-scale civilian killings of the war in the Eastern Province, predating the mosque and village attacks of 1990 by more than three years.
‘Everything was ash’
Violence returned to the coast several days after Kattankudy. On the night of 11 August 1990, LTTE cadres swept through the residential areas of Eravur, a town roughly 14 kilometres northwest of Batticaloa along the A15. Between 116 and 173 Muslim civilians, including women and children, were killed in their homes.
Residents Jahira, Ameen, and Kareem recounted the events collectively. Before the violence, they said, the Muslim community in Eravur had faced no major disputes with their neighbours, though tensions had begun rising as the LTTE started demanding money and stealing property such as motorcycles. A resident named Jalaldeen received advance warning of a planned attack and approached the local Army camp, but soldiers reportedly declined to intervene, saying they would look into it.
The attack began close to 10 or 11 p.m., with gunfire opening as residents stepped outside their homes in Saddam Hussein village and Punnakuda. Witnesses described scenes of extreme brutality, including a pregnant woman killed and children thrown against walls. In one area alone, the death toll reached 121.
The night might have ended in even greater loss had Jalaldeen not taken up arms himself when it became clear the Army was not coming. His counter-fire led the attackers to believe the Army had arrived, prompting their retreat – an act credited with saving many lives. The Army and Police reached Eravur only the following morning; then Minister of State for Defence Ranjan Wijeratne visited the site alongside Ali Zahir Moulana.
The wounded were sent first to local facilities, then to Polonnaruwa Hospital, with some of the critically injured airlifted from the Ampara/Batticaloa area. Residents of Kattankudy travelled to Eravur to help wash and prepare the bodies for burial. The massacre is commemorated there every year.
Not far away, in the coastal hamlet of Savukkady between Eravur and Chenkalady, a modest concrete cross stands near private gardens – erected not by the State, but by surviving family members. On 20 September 1990, it is alleged that soldiers entered Savukkady and killed 31 Tamil villagers in their homes and fields.
Rajendra, who survived the attack, described the village being systematically surrounded, with soldiers closing in from both sides to block any escape. “They shot us,” he recalled, describing how people were first gathered together before the firing began. He said some managed to escape towards the sea, while the attackers waited for people to be gathered together before setting the area alight.
It was only a week later, when survivors judged it safe to return, that the true scale of the loss became clear: a pit where the bodies of the dead had been placed and burnt together. “Everything was ash,” Rajendra said. He struggled to identify individual attackers, he explained, given how many had converged on the village from multiple directions.
No formal State investigation into the Savukkady killings has been conducted to date and the massacre has received little coverage in mainstream Sinhala media.
A massacre documented and ignored
On the northern edge of Batticaloa town, off the A15 near the lagoon, lies Sathurukondan – the site of one of the war’s most extensively documented, yet least publicly known, atrocities.
On 9 September 1990, it is alleged that members of the security forces rounded up residents of Sathurukondan and three neighbouring hamlets – Kokuvil, Panniachchiady and Pillayarady – for what was described as a security check. A total of 184 civilians, including 85 women, 28 elderly people, and 47 children under the age of 10, were taken into a military perimeter and killed.
Bishop Kingsley Swampillai, who served as Bishop of Batticaloa from 1983 to 2012, gave a firsthand account of the massacre’s aftermath in the BBC’s ‘Witness History’ programme. He first learnt of the killings, he said, from a survivor who had crawled away from the site and escaped after being left to burn.
Reporting the news to an Army Colonel, the Bishop later visited the site himself and described seeing skulls, body parts, and ashes where the dead had been covered with coconut leaves and set alight – a pattern he claimed had been repeated in several nearby locations.
He attributed the Army’s conduct to fury and a desire for revenge following the loss of some 600 Police officers to LTTE cadres, describing troops as marching into Batticaloa and cutting down anyone in their path. Bishop Swampillai noted that no one had ever been charged over the killings; soldiers, he said, were seen at the time as having done their duty, with promotion more likely than punishment.
A probe established by then President Chandrika Kumaratunga in 1997 identified three Army captains as responsible for the Sathurukondan killings. The retired Judge who led the inquiry, K. Palakidnar, found strong evidence supporting the massacre and urged the Government to hold the perpetrators accountable. No action followed. Only one man is known to have survived to give an account to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and human rights groups.
Each September, a remembrance is still held at the junction near the village, beside a monument that carries the names and ages of the victims, embedded permanently into its stone.
The killings at Sathurukondan were not isolated. On 5 September 1990, the head of the Army camp at Sathurukondan allegedly took 156 young Tamil men from the refugee camp at the Eastern University campus for questioning. Their names were recorded by camp officials. None of them returned, the residents say.
The deadliest day for Sri Lanka Police
Weeks before these events, on 11 June 1990, the LTTE carried out what remains the single deadliest day in the history of the Sri Lanka Police. Between 600 and 774 unarmed Police officers, stationed largely across the Ampara and Batticaloa Districts, were executed after surrendering their weapons.
The Government had ordered officers at stations including Kalmunai, Pottuvil, Akkaraipattu, and Sammanthurai to lay down their arms in the belief that the LTTE would release them unharmed. Instead, the surrendered officers – Sinhalese and Muslim alike – were transported to jungle sites such as Tirukovil, ordered to lie face down, tied up, and killed.
The Justice Walk
Amid all this grief and these heavy memories, one ritual continues daily, undimmed by the years.
Every morning at 9, a small group gathers near the Kallady Bridge in Batticaloa. They do not speak. They lift placards written on old newspapers, paper bags, worn cloth, and old saris and they begin to walk – 2 km through the town, in single file, in silence – until they reach a tree in Gandhi Park that the group has come to call the Justice Tree. Then, the next morning, they do it again. The walk has continued for more than 1,500 days.
The group is led largely by women. One member said they continued not because they expected to see change in their own lifetimes, but in the hope that “even if we do not see a beautiful life ourselves, the next generation will”.
Their demand, participants say, is for justice that is universal – one that does not depend on ethnicity, nationality, gender, or country, but is owed equally to every human being.
In the years since the war ended, the Eastern Province has seen sustained institutional investment in economic recovery and infrastructure – new roads, rebuilt buildings, a landscape stitched back together on the surface. Far less attention has gone to truth, accountability, or the sustained public space for grief that communities across the north and east have consistently asked for.
Walking between Kattankudy and Kallady Bridge, past unpatched mosque walls and a modest concrete cross in a private garden, it is the quiet that stays longest – not the silence of forgetting, but the silence of a region still waiting to be properly heard.