Germany: Murder of a Tamil girl
01 September 1993
Twelve days after she had disappeared, on the afternoon of Tuesday the 7 September, a cyclist saw a fire in the forest in Mindergangelt, which was later found to be the remains of 13 year old Sujitha Puvaneswaran's burnt body. The forensic examination had shown that Sujitha had been killed just before being burnt on 7 September.
On the 26 August, the parents of Sujitha Puvaneswaran went to the school (in Linich, Nordrhein Westfalen) to find out why Sujitha had not returned home from school. When they were told that she had not come to school at all, the parents became extremely worried and immediately informed the police. The police treated the parents with contempt and dismissive of the disappearance their daughter saying that she had probably gone somewhere with a friend. Extremely worried the parents informed their neighbours and started searching for their daughter.
As the days went by the parents and friends feared the worst. The police had not even taken the elementary step of putting her photo or a notice in the local newspapers. The editor of the Juelicher Volkszeitung, Reinhold Handke, said that they receive notices and photos for much less serious matters from the police, all the time. When a week of searching by the Tamil people achieved nothing, on the 2 September Sujitha's parents went to a lawyer to try to force the police to take some serious action - even at that stage Sujitha was still alive, and action by the police may have saved her life. But when confronted day after day by the parents the only response of the police was to try to construct a story that would provide an excuse for their negligence.
In the TV programme "Explosiv" on 13 September the police's message was: Sujitha had a boyfriend that the parents disapproved of and because of this, most probably, the parents killed her and according to Hindu custom burned her body. This crude racist stereotyping has a resonance in German society that the police counted on in order to hide their negligence. Kampagne fuer Menschenrechte in Sri Lanka und in Tamil Eelam commented that a few months ago the German government removed its "deportation stop" for Tamil people because of its important trade links with Sri Lanka. The group says: "The German police are more accustomed to threatening Tamil people with deportation than giving them any kind of assistance".
Kampagne fuer Menschenrechte in Sri Lanka und in Tamil Eelam, Dritte Welt Haus, Buchstrasse 14-16 D-28195 Bremen, Germany.