A group of masked gunmen threatened a Tamil activist earlier this month, warning “We will definitely kill you” if he continued to expose details of an alleged secret military-run torture site in the East.

Wimalasena Lavakumar said the incident occurred at his home when six men with T-56 and AK-47 rifles arrived on motorbikes at his home in Kiran.

“You have opened your mouth about many things in Batticaloa,” the gunmen told him. “Theevuchchenai is a hidden matter. You don’t start talking about it or going digging. You were wrong to do that.”

“Today we came to bump you off, but first, this is a warning,” they continued. “Your type are the ones who force us to dust our weapons and carry them again. If you engage in such activity once more, we will definitely kill you.”

The incident occurred after Lavakumar spoke out against a secret torture site in Theevuchchenai on the border with Polonnaruwa. The camp is allegedly run by Pillaiyan, alias Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, a government-linked paramilitary leader.

“I am pretty certain that none other than state intelligence units and paramilitaries affiliated to the government are able to carry out such acts,” Lavakumar told reporters.

“Because be it abductions during the past period, be it genocide, be it killings; as no proper investigation has been conducted to find out the many illegal acts committed by these and no one connected to these offences have been brought to justice and punished, they have been able to once again, freely engage in this weapons culture, death threats and the abduction of people.”

Lavakumar is a well-known activist in the Eastern province, and was previously arrested under the much-criticised Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA, after he was part of a group held a memorial event at a beach in Batticaloa to mark Tamil Genocide Day in 2021.