THE KILLING OF A PRIME MINISTER

by Sanjiva Senanayake

PART IV

(continued from last week)

SOMARAMA’S ‘CONFESSION’

In addition to the evidence of the three eye-witnesses, a statement made by Somarama to the Chief Magistrate of Colombo on November 14, 1959 was used by the prosecution to convince the jury that he was the assassin. Somarama retracted the statement long before the SC trial started, and its admissibility as evidence was contested in the SC.

Somarama had been moved to the prison hospital within a few days of the shooting and was then questioned in prison many times by police teams. The most senior police officer in the team was Superintendent of Police B.W. Perera.

Finally, on November 7, Somarama gave a statement to the police but it was short, vague and only mentioned Jayawardena. Then, a week later, he made the following statement to the Chief Magistrate of Colombo –

“One day in August 1959, when I was in the dispensary of the Ayurvedic Hospital in Borella, Reverend Buddharakkitha, the high priest of the Kelaniya temple, and H. P. Jayawardena came by car to see me. Inviting me into the car, Buddharakkitha began to complain bitterly about the general situation in the country. He said that vast sums of money were being lost at the port through strikes and mismanagement. He expressed grave fears that, if the current trends were not arrested, there would be no place for us in the land, nor would there be a future for the Sinhalese people, their religion or their language.

“He suggested that we take steps to do away with the Prime Minister, as we would then be free to fashion things as we wished. I asked him what would befall us if we were to do such a thing. “Nothing will happen to us”, he replied. ‘I have made all the arrangements with those whose assistance we need’. Jayawardena said, “If you should only do this job, we shall ensure that you are out of remand in two or three weeks’ time”.

“Buddharakkitha in turn reassured me that everything would be alright – that I had nothing to fear. I acceded to their request, explaining that I was consenting to do such a thing to one who had done me no wrong only for the sake of my country, my religion and my race. I told them that I had two pupils and also my temple to look after, but they promised to see to all that. They then said that in a day or two they would bring me a revolver, after which all details could be discussed.

“Two or three days later, Buddharakkitha brought me a revolver about a foot in length. It was a six-chambered one and was loaded. We then went to Ragama, met Dickie de Zoysa and proceeded along with him to Muthurajawela. There I fired several times at the fruits of a ‘kaduru’ tree. When I struck a fruit and felled it, someone in the party exclaimed, ‘Bravo, well done!’ After the firing we returned to my temple, having dropped Dickie de Zoysa at Ragama.

Thereafter Rev. Buddharakkitha and Jayawardena visited me often. One day, Amarasinghe, the Chairman of the Kolonnawa Urban Council, also came along with Buddharakkitha.

“Buddharakkitha, Jayawardena and I had agreed that the job be done on September 25. That morning, in order to pluck up courage, I drank a mixture which I had prepared myself and went to the Prime Minister’s residence at Rosmead Place. When the Prime Minister was talking to another monk on the verandah, I started trembling through fear. But the mixture I had taken sustained my courage. On the verandah I shot at the Prime Minister once. That shot struck him. While he was running into the house, I ran behind him and fired three more shots. Then I was overpowered. Someone shot me too and I was rendered unconscious. I do not know what happened next.”

There are several interesting features. There was no mention of visiting Amarasinghe’s house, just a discussion in a car in August, and no mention of Newton Perera either. Dickie de Zoysa had tagged along for the ride to Muthurajawela but, one month later, when hearings commenced at the magistrate’s court, the police withdrew the case against him for lack of evidence. There’s no mention of training but Somarama says he aimed at some fruits at Muthurajawela and succeeded in hitting them, establishing that he was somehow handy with a revolver. He states that he ran behind the PM and shot him but all the entry wounds on the PM were in the front or side of his body.

Somarama retracted this ‘confession’ at the end of the magisterial inquiry (on July 15, 1960), seven months before the SC trial began. In the retraction he stated –

“When I expressed reluctance to make a false statement as required by the police, I was shown a newspaper which said that the death penalty had been re-introduced and was told that, in view of this development, there could be no doubt that I would be sentenced to death and hanged. If, however, I were to make a statement to a magistrate professing that I was doing so voluntarily, the police promised to have me released and made a crown witness. To me, who now lived in the shadow of death, the offer of freedom was irresistible. Therefore, I made a statement to the Magistrate as required by the police, asserting that I was making it of my own free will. In it I implicated the persons whom the police wanted me to implicate. I now state that statement was absolutely untrue.”

The first visit to Somarama in prison by the police team was on October 2, the date on which the government had issued an extraordinary Gazette repealing the suspension of capital punishment. Somarama in a statement from the Dock, made on April 6, 1961, went further and said that B.W. Perera showed him the front page of the newspaper, explained that the death penalty had been reintroduced and he would certainly be hanged. Perera had then asked him to give a statement that he had shot the PM on the instructions of Buddharakkitha and Jayawardena and in exchange he would be made a Crown Witness and escape death. Somarama also said that Perera had mentioned the pardon given to Rupananda, one of the accused in the Turf Club robbery and murder case, as an example. Perera had been on the police team that handled that famous case ten years earlier. It should be noted that Amarasinghe had already been made a Crown Witness six months before Somarama’s retraction. Somarama also said that he had developed an addiction to opium after being medically treated earlier for haemorrhoids, and that he was offered some opium by Perera.

Incidentally, B.W. Perera subsequently committed suicide, in early 1960, when it came to light that he had provided some ammunition to an intermediary, ostensibly acting on behalf of Buddharakkitha. There was no evidence of those bullets being used to assassinate the PM.

Visiting prisoners in remand to question them regarding cases in which they themselves were involved was considered irregular. During the SC trial, the Chief Magistrate of Colombo and some senior Prisons officers stated that it had never happened before in their experience. However, despite objections by Somarama’s counsel, the Judge ruled that it was acceptable since Somarama had been jailed before the police had an opportunity to question him adequately.

Somarama’s counsel also argued that, according to the law, the retracted ‘confession’ should not be admissible as evidence since there were circumstances that showed that it had been made as a result of inducement, threat or promise. He emphasized that in accordance with the prevailing Evidence Ordinance, even the ‘appearance’ of such influence would render it inadmissible, but Justice T.S. Fernando ruled that there should be clear evidence of influence.

The judgement of the Court of Criminal Appeal (https://www.lawnet.gov.lk/the-queen-v-mapitigama-buddharakkita-thera-and-2-others/) contains a rather ambiguous comment on this matter. It states –

“Held, (i) that the admission in evidence of a confession made by the 4th accused to the Magistrate, even assuming that the confession was not voluntary and was obnoxious to section 24 of the Evidence Ordinance or was otherwise inadmissible, could not vitiate the conviction of the 4th accused, because the fact that the 4th accused killed the deceased was established beyond any manner of doubt by the direct evidence of some of those present at the deceased’s house at the time when he was shot there.”

Interestingly, that court had a different view on the value of the ‘confession’ as well. Another passage in the judgement reads –

“Even if any or all of these submissions are entitled to succeed, that would make no difference in the instant case, because the fact that the 4th accused killed the deceased was established beyond any manner of doubt by the direct evidence. Indeed, it is surprising that with that evidence available the prosecution thought it necessary to lengthen the proceedings so much by seeking to prove the confession.”

The prosecution appears to have had a different assessment of the adequacy of the ‘direct evidence’ at their disposal.

MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS

The PM knew Somarama well and had interacted with him on matters relating to the College of Indigenous Medicine even a few weeks before the shooting. Somarama had been involved in campaigning for the MEP and had chaired meetings where Bandaranaike had spoken. Yet, in his ‘Address to the Nation’ written for broadcast by radio, he did not say the assailant was Somarama. He didn’t even say it was a genuine monk – just “a foolish man” wearing robes. The PM was known to be very precise in his use of words, especially in English. He had been joking with doctors and nurses at the hospital despite his injuries, fully expecting to survive, so he was in control of his mental faculties. It’s hard to believe that the PM could not recognize Somarama at such close quarters.

Somarama’s behaviour that fateful morning also raises doubts about his guilt. When he set out that morning in a taxi, which is easily traceable, he offered a lift to two people for part of the way – hardly the behaviour of an assassin primed for action within a couple of hours. Then, while sitting on the verandah of the PM’s house, he had quite normal conversations with others minutes before he allegedly became homicidal. Ananda even asked Somarama for an appointment for a friend with an eye ailment, and was requested to send him the following Thursday.

Somarama’s movements on the eve of the shooting (September 24, 1959) were quite normal too. In fact, when Buddharakkitha and Jayawardena visited Somarama’s temple that evening (for last minute consultations and instructions, according to the prosecution), they found him missing. Somarama was relaxing at a temple in Kotahena, having a chat with his friend, Colamba Saranankara. Is it likely that the master-mind and his chosen instrument of death didn’t know each other’s whereabouts, or even that they were due to meet, on the day before the long-planned assassination of the Prime Minister?

The police recovered three outer robes and an inner jacket worn by Buddhist monks lying discarded in the premises after the shooting. Somarama’s outer robe and inner jacket were pulled off in the struggle and that accounted for one robe. Even if Somarama wore two robes that day, as the prosecution argued, one more robe remained a mystery. The prosecution suggested, rather facetiously, that they had probably been kept in the house to be gifted to monks.

A woman who was cooking in a house across the road had come out on hearing the shots and saw a man vault over the perimeter wall of the PM’s house. He shouted “Hari machang” to someone in one of two cars parked on the road outside, jumped into the other one and both cars sped off towards Borella. The prosecution did not call her to give evidence, but Weeramantry did. When the prosecution could not shake her evidence, they suggested that the escapee was probably a ‘look-out’ working in league with the conspirators, and even argued that it bolstered the ‘fact’ that there was a conspiracy. It seems far-fetched that a ‘look-out’ would have had two private cars at his disposal whereas the alleged assassin, Somarama, arrived alone in a taxi that could be easily traced.

Several other common-sense questions come to mind re Buddharakkitha’s motivations and actions.

= why would a young, powerful and street-smart monk like Buddharakkitha, with his life before him, risk losing everything by killing the PM, without even having a replacement ‘sponsor’ in place?

= was he the type to wait for over one year, as the indictment indicated, before taking his revenge?

= why did he not use his close links with underworld characters to kill the PM in some remote location, perhaps as he campaigned?

= why would he draw attention to himself by sending another Buddhist monk to murder the PM in public and in broad daylight?

= why would the ‘plan’ be for Somarama to go into the house after the shooting, where he was sure to be captured, rather than escape in the ensuing chaos?

In addition to the bullet-points above, is it conceivable that Somarama could have expected to be believed when he pleaded innocence, after shooting the PM in front of so many people? On the day, he did not proudly exult that he did it for country, religion and race, as he did in his ‘confession’.

CONCLUSION

As stated earlier, the jury operated in a politically charged, pressure-cooker atmosphere, with limited technical facilities and under tremendous time pressure. On top of that, there was quite a lot of evidence presented that appeared to have little relevance to the assassination per se, which they still had to take note of and assess. The judge’s summing up alone was spread over six days. They didn’t have the luxury, that we now do, of being able to refer to documents and contemplate at leisure.

In the end, the members of the Special Jury were convinced that the prosecution’s case was proved beyond reasonable doubt, and that is what finally mattered. As Justice Fernando mentioned in his charge to the Jury, they were the sole judges of fact and therefore the real judges in the case. Besides, their opinion was in consonance with that of the experienced judges of the Court of Criminal Appeal.

In that Court, the focus was mainly on legalistic aspects, such as whether the Judge misinterpreted or misguided the jury in matters of law. It was not a full re-assessment of the evidence, but specific submissions made by the defence counsel were considered and addressed. Deliberations were concluded on January 15, 1962.

The main focus of this series of articles is on the testimony in the SC of the witnesses, especially the ‘eye-witnesses’, and the forensic evidence as they relate very specifically to the case against Somarama. His culpability is at the core of the case.

Obviously, there are many other aspects of the alleged conspiracy – in and out of court, legal and political – that could not be covered in an article of this length. There were also many colourful characters who played their parts in this long drama that held the entire nation spellbound all those years ago. Adding even some of them on, would have diverted attention from the main actor – Talduwe Somarama.

It all boils down to a key question.

Can we be reasonably sure of anything beyond the fact that the assassin was a man – foolish or fiendish – “dressed in the robes of a monk”? That is all we know for certain from the only 100% reliable eye-witness …. the late S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike himself.

And, if the murderer was not Somarama, who was it, and why did he come dressed as a Buddhist monk?

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The writer can be contacted on this subject at skgsenanayake@gmail.com