MR Larger than Life
Integrity of Elections in Sri Lanka Endangered - Freedom House
Freedom House
Friday, January 22nd, 2010

As Sri Lankans go to the polls as a unified nation for the first time in more than two decades, Freedom House is deeply concerned about electoral misconduct and Sri Lankan authorities' flagrant disregard for the rule of law.

Shock and anger continue one year after Lasantha’s unpunished murder
Reporters Without Borders
Thursday, January 7th, 2010

"A year has gone by without any progress in the investigation into his murder," Lal Wickrematunge said today to Reporters Without Borders, on the eve of the first anniversary of the fatal shooting of his brother, Lasantha Wickrematunge, the Colombo-based Sunday Leader's well-known managing editor. It is Lal who has replaced him at the helm of investigative weekly, some of whose journalists were recently threatened.

LW Time
Sri Lanka Journalists Still on Edge After Lasantha's Death
TIME Magazine
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
A year after the murder of the prominent Sri Lankan editor Lasantha Wickrematunge, the island's independent media is still under siege. An investigation into Wickrematunge's death has gone nowhere, and at least half a dozen other journalists, including his widow, have left the country in fear since his death.
Mahinda Rajapaksa
Clear your name: Sonali Challenges Mahinda
U&U Newsdesk
Monday, January 4th, 2010

President Mahinda Rajapakse has been challenged to dispel the widely held perception that his government is complicit in a cover up of Lasantha Wickrematunge's assassins. In a letter dated January 4, 2010, Sonali Samarasinghe Wickrematunge highlighted the various steps taken by the state to stonewall an investigation into her husband's murder and called for an "impartial, transparent and professional inquiry" into the killing.

Lal
His work was his passion, but now he is gone - Lal
The Sunday Leader
Sunday, January 10th, 2010

A year has passed since Lasantha was brutally murdered on the high streets of the city. During this period the LTTE has been wiped out, provincial council elections held, Kumaran Pathmanathan arrested and brought back to Sri Lanka from foreign soil in a sting-like operation, presidential elections called two years prematurely only because the incumbent deems its opportune for him and of course 24 hearings have been held in the Mount Lavinia Court into Lasantha’s murder without any breakthrough! Incredible?

Gotabhaya Rajapaksa in the Chris Morris Interview
SecDef "not concerned" About Lasantha's Murder
U&U Newsdesk
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

In an interview with the BBC's Chris Morris, aired on February 2, 2009, Sri Lanka's Defence Secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, who is also President Mahinda Rajapaksa's brother, brushed off the assassination of Sunday Leader Editor Lasantha Wickrematunge, dismissing the veteran journalist as "someone who was writing to a tabloid." Rajapaksa warned the government would consider all forms of dissent during this "time of war" to be tantamount to treason, a crime which is constitutionally punishable by death.

The Exhibit
An artist’s monument to Lasantha in Vienna
U&U Newsdesk
Sunday, October 18th, 2009

Peter Sandbichler one of Austria's celebrated architects and artists pays tribute to one of Sri Lanka's courageous sons.

The sculpture about 8 metres high stands outside on the Museum Quartier (MQ) forecourt. According to the Mumok Vienna's world famous Museum of Modern Arts, the artist "uses this public space in order to construct a tower-like billboard on which abstract sculpture and concrete message interact with each other: at close quarters it appears to be purely a grid of forms, but as the day goes on it turns out from a distance to be a portrait of the Sri-Lankan journalist Lasantha Wickrematunge.

And Then They Came For Me
Lasantha Wickrematunge
Sunday, January 11th, 2009

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism. In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.