These are not happy days for Sri Lanka’s journalists, particularly those who are willing to be independent and investigative. Three fearless journalists have come under attack. And one of them, Lasantha Wickremesinghe was killed. As the Editor of  Sunday Leader, he had been a  thorn to the government and had been locked in a series of court cases . One of these cases was slapped by the Defence Secretary, who is also the brother of President Rajapaksa. It is this background that has prompted observers to suspect the hand of the establishment  notwithstanding official denials and orders for a high level probe to ferret out the truth.

Upali Tennakoon, chief editor of the Rivira weekly, is not in the same league as Lasantha. But he too came under attack. While driving on the outskirts of Colombo with his wife, two men on motorbikes pulled up in front of his car and told him to get out. When he refused, they smashed the car window and attacked him and his wife with wooden clubs and a knife Both are recuperating in the hospital.

‘Lasantha’s attack, you can speculate that it came from the government side, because he was very critical of the government. But Tennakoon ran his paper in a very impartial way. We are neither pro-government nor pro-opposition’, Stanley Samarasinghe, a senior journalist at Rivira, said.

Unidentified gunmen have attacked and partially destroyed the headquarters of MTV, a private television station that had been criticized in state media for its coverage of the Eelam War IV.

These attacks will only exacerbate the climate of fear that pervades Sri Lanka’s once vibrant media industry; many top journalists are already in hiding or sheltering overseas.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has asked foreign diplomats in Colombo to ‘weigh in forcefully and immediately’ with President Mahinda Rajapaksa to put an end to such attacks.

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Human Rights Watch, the New York-based rights group, wrote an open letter to President Rajapaksa asking him to drop all charges against journalists held on ‘politically’ motivated charges.

J.S. Tissainayagam, a journalist, and N. Jashiharan, a publisher, and his wife, V. Valamathy, are amongst those held since March 2008.  HRW said, ‘Tissainayagam’s arrest was politically motivated and his detention has involved a litany of due process violations’.

‘The prosecution of journalists only reinforces the impression that the government has embarked on a systematic campaign to smother free media’, it said.