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August 22, 2005
Philip Gourevitch Describes Security That Surrounded Kadirgamar
Journalist Philip Gourevitch, writing in the August 29, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, describes the elaborate security he found surrounding the late Sri Lankan Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, when he visited with him in Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital, earlier this year. He wrote: Colombo 7, with its wide boulevards and winding, leafy lanes, is dense with government ministries and foreign embassies, and, clustered between them, the private homes of the political and business élite-- villas ranging in scale from ample to opulent. Colombo 7, therefore, is also a zone of elaborate security arrangements: blockaded streets picketed with military guards, men crouched in the shade cradling assault rifles, walled compounds and, in some of them, private militias.
The home of the Foreign Minister, Lakshman Kadirgamar, for instance, was hidden from view by a high perimeter wall, when I visited him earlier this year, and behind that wall rose another one, for good measure. At a fortified guard booth, my cell phone was taken into custody for the duration of my visit, and when I was ushered to a rattan chair on the house's deep veranda to await my audience, I found myself flanked by a pile of machine guns. "Yet, despite such precautions," Mr. Gourevitch noted, "Mr. Kadirgamar was shot dead at his home on the evening of Friday, August 12th, hit four times by snipers firing from a neighbor's house."
For more, see "Killing Kadirgamar."
Posted by Munir Umrani at August 22, 2005 03:21 AM
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