"THE MORE YOU DIG, THE MORE BODIES ARE FOUND": 260 SETS IDENTIFIED AT CHEMMANI

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"THE MORE YOU DIG, THE MORE BODIES ARE FOUND": 260 SETS IDENTIFIED AT CHEMMANI — DAY 11 OF THIRD PHASE REVEALS THREE MORE — THE EARTH REFUSES TO KEEP THE STATE'S SECRETS

CHEMMANI, JAFFNA, SRI LANKA — 08 May 2026

THE DISCOVERY

Today, excavation teams at the Chemmani mass grave site in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, uncovered three additional sets of skeletal remains on Day 11 of the Third Excavation Phase, in the northern excavation zone of the Chemmani perimeter — an area newly opened to investigation following ground-penetrating radar anomalies flagged in the preceding week. The cumulative total now stands at 260 sets of remains identified, of which 256 have been formally exhumed. These numbers are not abstractions. They represent 260 individuals — each with a name, a family, a life interrupted — whose deaths were concealed from the historical record and whose families have been denied knowledge of their fate for over a quarter century. Each discovery reinforces a harrowing pattern that forensic teams and observers on the ground have consistently noted: "the more you dig, the more bodies are found." The steady accumulation of remains — day after day, phase after phase — is not the signature of isolated incidents. It is the numerical testament to industrialised disappearance: a systematic, deliberate, and large-scale concealment of crimes that the state has neither fully acknowledged nor accounted for.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The Chemmani site carries one of the heaviest histories of any location in Sri Lanka's post-war landscape. In 1999, a Sri Lankan Army soldier named Somaratne Rajapakse, facing an unrelated murder trial, confessed to the existence of a mass grave at Chemmani, stating that bodies of Tamil civilians and suspected combatants had been buried there by security forces. The confession prompted judicial intervention and an initial excavation that located skeletal remains — but the process was interrupted, politically managed, and ultimately shelved. For the better part of two decades, the site was caught in a cycle of institutional indifference: limited excavations producing limited accountability, halted by political pressure from successive administrations unwilling to pursue the chain of command responsible for what was buried there. Families and civil society organisations — many of them operating with minimal resources and under significant social pressure — kept the issue alive through documentation, advocacy, and legal petitions, refusing to allow Chemmani to disappear from public memory as completely as those buried within it had disappeared from public acknowledgement. The Third Excavation Phase, now underway, represents a renewed — though still insufficiently resourced and insufficiently independent — effort to excavate the full truth of this site.

Chemmani must be understood not as an isolated atrocity but as one node in a national pattern. Sri Lanka carries one of the highest recorded rates of enforced disappearances in Asia, with tens of thousands of cases documented across the decades of conflict. The Office on Missing Persons (OMP), established in 2016 with a mandate to search for and clarify the fate of the disappeared, has been widely criticised by families, civil society, and international human rights bodies for its structural limitations: it lacks prosecutorial authority, operates without meaningful independence from the executive, is chronically under-resourced relative to the scale of its mandate, and has produced few outcomes that families of the disappeared would characterise as justice. At Chemmani, the OMP's footprint has been negligible. The gap between the scale of what the site reveals and the adequacy of the state's institutional response has never been wider — nor more morally untenable.

FORENSIC PROCESS

Each set of recovered remains is processed under rigorous forensic protocols designed to meet the evidentiary standards of international judicial proceedings. Excavation near human remains is conducted exclusively by hand — using trowels and fine brushes to expose bone without displacement or contamination. A team of certified forensic anthropologists and archaeologists documents every find in situ, assigning a unique cataloguing reference number, recording precise GPS coordinates, and photographing the burial context from multiple angles before any element is disturbed. The orientation and depth of burial are recorded with particular care: these variables carry significant forensic weight in establishing the approximate timeframe of interment and the circumstances of death. Forensic odontologists examine dental remains alongside anthropologists, providing additional layers of biological profiling. Remains are then carefully lifted, sealed in labelled tamper-evident evidence packaging, and transported under continuous supervision to a secured facility, maintaining an unbroken chain of custody at every stage. That chain of custody is not procedural formality — it is the legal architecture upon which any future international prosecution must be built, and any break in it risks rendering evidence inadmissible before international tribunals.

Of the 256 sets exhumed, forensic laboratories are actively processing DNA comparisons against the Chemmani Family DNA Database — a repository of genetic profiles submitted voluntarily by relatives of the disappeared, built over years of community outreach by civil society organisations working in the Jaffna district. Positive identifications have begun returning results to families — a process described by forensic coordinators as both painstaking and, in its human dimensions, overwhelming. The DNA matching programme faces a serious structural challenge: hundreds of samples are currently queued for analysis, and the programme remains critically underfunded and understaffed relative to the volume of material requiring examination. International forensic laboratory partnerships — with institutions in Europe, North America, and Australia — are urgently needed to accelerate the matching process and return identified remains to families without further delay. The emotional weight of a positive identification cannot be overstated. For families who have waited twenty-seven years or more, confirmation of a loved one's fate — even in death — represents the restoration of a dignity that was violently stripped from them. Every week of backlog is a week of continued denial.

THE PATTERN

Observers, forensic coordinators, and family representatives have repeatedly articulated what has become an impossible-to-ignore forensic reality at Chemmani: "the more you dig, the more bodies are found." This phrase — spoken first in grief, now repeated as documented fact — has become both a forensic observation and a moral indictment. A composite statement from forensic coordinators working on site captures the weight of this pattern: soil disturbance analysis and stratification mapping indicate that the current excavation area encompasses only a portion of the site's total footprint of interment. Ground-penetrating radar surveys conducted in parallel with physical excavation have flagged additional subsurface anomalies beyond the current perimeter — anomalies consistent with further burial deposits. The implications are stark: the 260 sets identified to date may represent a fraction of the total number of individuals interred at Chemmani. This is not speculation — it is a forensic projection grounded in the physical evidence of the site itself. The pattern compels a reckoning that can no longer be deferred through procedural inaction or political calculation. Every day that passes without expanded, fully resourced, internationally supervised excavation is a day in which the full truth of Chemmani remains deliberately incomplete.

WHAT THE LAW DEMANDS

Sri Lanka's obligations at Chemmani are not matters of political preference — they are binding commitments under international law. Sri Lanka is a state party to the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPED), ratified in 2016. Under ICPED, Sri Lanka is legally obligated to: conduct a prompt, thorough, and impartial investigation into every case of enforced disappearance; disclose the full truth of the fate and whereabouts of the disappeared to their families; prosecute those responsible, regardless of rank or affiliation; and provide adequate reparations to victims and their families. Sri Lanka is also bound by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Geneva Conventions, both of which impose obligations of accountability for unlawful killings and enforced disappearances in contexts of armed conflict. Chemmani is not a cold-case anomaly — it is an ongoing violation. The failure to conduct a comprehensive, independent, and internationally supervised investigation is itself a continuing breach of these obligations. The international community has both the legal basis and the moral authority to demand compliance.

The Office on Missing Persons (OMP), established under Sri Lanka's 2016 legislation as the primary mechanism for addressing enforced disappearances, has fallen demonstrably short of what the scale and gravity of Chemmani demands. The OMP lacks prosecutorial authority — it can investigate and recommend, but it cannot charge, try, or sentence. It operates within an executive framework that has historically demonstrated greater interest in managing accountability narratives than in enabling them. Its budget and staffing are entirely disproportionate to the number of cases — estimated at over 20,000 — within its mandate. It has no power to compel military disclosure of records, deployment histories, or command structures. At Chemmani specifically, the OMP's engagement has been peripheral. The Chemmani Truth and Accountability Coalition, alongside a broad coalition of civil society partners, calls upon the United Nations Human Rights Council to mandate an independent international investigation into Chemmani — one with full access to the site, to state records, to military archives, and to witnesses — as the only mechanism capable of filling the accountability vacuum the OMP was never designed to address.

CALLS FOR ACTION

The Chemmani Truth & Accountability Coalition (CTAC) sets out the following five demands, each of which it regards as non-negotiable and urgently overdue. First, the Sri Lankan government must immediately accept and facilitate the deployment of a fully independent international forensic oversight team, accredited by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), to supervise all phases of excavation, evidence documentation, and DNA identification at Chemmani — with unrestricted access and the authority to certify the integrity of all findings. Second, a transparent, publicly accessible, real-time digital registry of all identified remains and the current status of DNA matching must be established and maintained by an independent body, accessible to families, civil society, media, and international observers without precondition. Third, the Sri Lankan government must guarantee unimpeded, dignified, and logistically supported access for families of the disappeared — including transportation and accommodation assistance for those travelling from outside Jaffna — to observe proceedings, receive timely updates, and participate in identification processes. Fourth, the evidentiary record compiled at Chemmani must be formally referred to the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions and to the ICCPED Committee, with a full state report on Sri Lanka's compliance with its treaty obligations specifically regarding this site. Fifth, obstruction of the Chemmani proceedings — in any form, by any party — must be immediately criminalised, and those responsible for enforced disappearances at this site must face full criminal prosecution without limitation of time or rank.

VOICES FROM THE WAITING

"I named him after the dawn. He was taken before he turned twenty-three. I have kept his photograph on the wall for twenty-seven years. Every time I see the news from Chemmani, I press my hand to the photograph and I say — wait a little longer. They are coming. Chemmani will give him back to me. I believe this." — Voice 1: Composite statement reflecting testimonies of mothers of the disappeared at Chemmani

 

 

"My brother used to say that truth is like a root — no matter how deep you bury it, it will always find the surface. Chemmani is that root. We will not let them bury it again." — Voice 2: Composite statement reflecting testimonies of sisters of the disappeared at Chemmani

 

A CALL ACROSS THE WORLD

Tamil diaspora communities in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, and Germany carry a particular weight of responsibility at this moment — and a particular power to translate it into action. In Canada, Tamil Canadian members of Parliament and community organisations are urged to raise Chemmani formally in the House of Commons and in relevant parliamentary committees, and to press the Department of Global Affairs to issue a formal diplomatic statement on Sri Lanka's accountability obligations under ICPED. In the United Kingdom, Tamil British advocates should bring Chemmani to the floor of Parliament and engage the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) with a demand for bilateral diplomatic pressure on Colombo and for UK-based forensic laboratory support for the DNA identification programme. In Australia, the Tamil community and its allies should engage the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) and relevant senators and members to ensure Chemmani is named specifically in Australia's bilateral human rights dialogue with Sri Lanka. In France and Germany, Tamil community representatives should engage their governments and the European Union's human rights mechanisms — including the EU's Annual Report on Human Rights and Democracy — to ensure Chemmani is formally and specifically cited in European diplomatic engagement with Colombo. In every country, diaspora communities are called upon to attend and amplify commemorations on 18 May — Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day — with Chemmani featured explicitly and visibly, so that the world understands that these two histories are inseparable.

The Chemmani Truth & Accountability Coalition addresses directly the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions; the UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion of Truth, Justice, Reparation and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence; the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR); and the UN Human Rights Council. We call upon the Special Rapporteurs to conduct a formal visit to the Chemmani site at the earliest opportunity, to engage directly with forensic coordinators and families, and to issue a public statement on the findings of the Third Excavation Phase. We urge the Human Rights Council to ensure that Chemmani is specifically included in the upcoming Universal Periodic Review (UPR) cycle review of Sri Lanka — not as a footnote, but as a central case study in the state's compliance with its accountability obligations. And we urge the ICCPED Committee to formally request a state report from Sri Lanka detailing its compliance with the Convention specifically with respect to Chemmani, including a full account of military records, command histories, and forensic findings to date. The mechanisms of international accountability exist. The question is whether the institutions that steward them have the will to deploy them.

CLOSING STATEMENT

The dead at Chemmani did not choose silence — they were silenced. But the earth does not forget what the state tries to erase. With every day of excavation, with every set of remains that surfaces from the soil of Jaffna, the full weight of what was done here becomes undeniable — not as allegation, not as advocacy claim, but as physical, documented, forensic fact. Two hundred and sixty sets of remains. Two hundred and fifty-six exhumed. Three more today. The count continues because the concealment was vast. The Chemmani Truth & Accountability Coalition stands with the families who have waited a generation for truth — mothers who kept photographs on walls, sisters who carried their brothers' words for decades, communities who refused to let memory be buried alongside the disappeared. We will not stop. The excavation will continue. The documentation will be preserved. The demands for justice will be amplified until they cannot be ignored. The world must not look away. Chemmani speaks from the earth. It is time for every institution, every government, and every conscience that claims to care about human rights to listen — and to act.

     In solidarity,

     Wimal Navaratnam

     Human Rights Defender |Independent Researcher | ABC Tamil Oli (ECOSOC)

      Email: tamilolicanada@gmail.com