The former Sri Lankan state minister and paramilitary leader Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, widely known as Pillayan, has been remanded until 13 July after appearing before the Batticaloa Magistrate's Court on Tuesday in connection with five killings carried out in the Eastern Province in 2008.
As he was escorted from court, Pillayan addressed journalists, insisting the charges were fabricated.
"All the allegations levelled against me are false allegations. Fake allegations. Just like Anura's mouth, everything is a lie," he said, in a swipe at the Sri Lankan president Anura Kumara Dissanayake, before adding, "This is something that makes you happy, isn't it?"
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) filed the cases on 15 June against Pillayan and other suspects over five shootings in the Batticaloa District in 2008, naming him as the third suspect and alleged to be the mastermind.
Held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), he was produced before the magistrate, Darshini, for proceedings on three charges relating to the killings, along with a separate case concerning a land dispute in Kallady. His counsel asked that he be detained at Batticaloa Prison and that the PTA case be converted into an ordinary criminal case, a form of relief routinely denied to the Tamil civilians, activists and journalists held under the same law. The court remanded him until 13 July, and adjourned the land-dispute case to 29 October.
According to the CID, the killings were carried out with T-56 assault rifles. Two people, including a former police officer, were shot dead near the Murugan Temple in Kallady on 9 January 2008; two more were killed on the main road in Kattankudy on 22 May, a shooting investigators allege Pillayan ordered after one of the victims claimed at a public meeting to have assassinated the Tamil National Alliance MP Joseph Pararajasingham; and a fifth man was shot dead by an armed group at Kothiyapula, in the Vavunatheevu area, on the night of 20 August.
Pillayan leads the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP), the paramilitary group that broke away from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the 2004 split led by Vinayagamoorthy Muralitharan, known as Karuna Amman, and then aligned itself with the Sri Lankan state. Pillayan went on to contest the 2008 Eastern Provincial Council election under Mahinda Rajapaksa and was installed as chief minister of the Eastern Province, later serving as a state minister under Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Throughout, the TMVP faced sustained allegations of abductions, killings and other abuses across the East.
His legal history is long and, until recently, marked by impunity. He was arrested in 2015 and held for more than five years over the 2005 assassination of Pararajasingham, who was gunned down during Christmas Eve mass at a Batticaloa church, before being acquitted in 2021 after the Attorney General's Department, under a Rajapaksa presidency he had served, declined to proceed. He is currently in remand over the 2006 abduction and killing of the Eastern University vice-chancellor, Professor Sivasubramaniam Raveendranath, who disappeared in Colombo while passing through a heavily militarised zone and whose remains have never been found.
When the CID arrested him in April 2025, government figures publicly tied the move to the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, following a Channel 4 documentary that alleged links between military intelligence, Pillayan and Karuna, and the bombings. No Easter-related charge has since been brought, and the cases now before the courts concern the 2006 disappearance and the 2008 killings instead, prompting questions about the gap between the government's public claims and what it has actually charged.