Ketheshwaran Loganathan, Deputy Secretary General of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP) was gunned down at his home on Saturday, 12 August, late in the evening by members of the pistol group of the LTTE. Mr. Loganathan, was a prominent Tamil political activist and intellectual with a long history of commitment to peace in Sri Lanka.

Mr. Loganathan joined SCOPP as its Deputy Secretary General in March this year, resigning from his post as Director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) and Head of its Conflict & Peace Analysis Unit. He had wide experience in research and analysis as well as communications and journalism. Since the appointment of the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) in July this year, Mr. Loganathan played a pivotal role as the Secretary to the All Party Representative Committee (APRC) providing vital secretariat support to the deliberations of this committee. He had a strong belief that the national question must be resolved through negotiations.

The LTTE felt threatened by the deliberations of the APRC and the efforts of the government to formulate a permanent settlement to the national question. The LTTE are known to have on several occasions threatened Tamil representatives on the APRC in an effort to cripple the process. The assassination of Mr. Loganathan, a key Government official in the APRC process is reminiscent to the assassination of Dr. Neelan Thiruchelvam, a co-architect of the 1995 constitutional reform proposals. It is also symbolic that Mr. Loganthan was assassinated on 12 August, one year to the date of the assassination of the late Hon. Lakshman Kadiragamar.

Kethesh was also engaged in Tamil politics from 1983 –1995 as a member of the Ealam People’s Liberation Front and was a member of the Tamil delegation at the Thimpu peace talks in 1985. He continued to be engaged in proximity talks leading to the Indo-Lanka Accords and also made representations to the Managala Moonesinghe Parliamentary Select Committee on behalf of the EPRLF. He withdrew from Tamil politics and the EPRLF in 1995.

Mr. Loganathan had a Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Georgetown University, Washington DC and a MA in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague in the Netherlands.

The government unreservedly condemns this brutal assassination of Ketheshwaran Loganathan, DSG of SCOPP and expresses its condolences to his wife Bhavani.

The only sin committed by Kethesh, the gentle intellectual, was to be a Tamil dissident voice which challenged the sole representative status of the LTTE