Sri Lanka
Editors receive death threatsPosted Nov 11 2009
Editors of Sri Lanka’s Sunday Leader received anonymous, death-threatening letters last week that look similar to those mailed to the newspaper’s founder and managing editor, Lasantha Wickramatunga, the month before his murder in January.
The letters were “almost identical to what Lasantha got three weeks before he was murdered,” Frederica Jansz, editor-in-chief of Sunday Leader, told CPJ in an e-mail. Jansz and News Editor Munza Mushtaq received identical letters on Oct. 22 that featured the words: “If you write anymore, we will kill you and slice you into pieces,” written in red ink.
Sunday Leader has continually featured content critical of the government, but Jansz told CPJ that she believes the death threats are reactions to an interview she gave Al-Jazeera about footage that showed a man in a Sri Lankan military uniform executing unarmed Tamil prisoners, some naked with their hands tied behind their backs. The government denied the video’s validity and claimed that Jansz’s comments deemed the footage accurate.
Jansz went to police headquarters in Mount Lavinia on Oct. 27 to file a complaint about the threats. “We wrote to the police station describing the threats but the police have not contacted me,” she told Reporters Without Borders.
Leader Publications, publisher of Sunday Leader, is currently facing complaints brought by the president’s brother, Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. One accuses Jansz of contempt of court for printing a profile of Rajapaksa after a judge ordered the Leader not to publish anything about him. The Defense Ministry’s Web site has accused the publisher’s lawyers of being traitors, and another site linked to the ministry calls some of Jansz’s comments to foreign news media “prostitution.”