With respect Faraz you had no other choice than to write what you did!

If you were shot and injured and by God’s good grace survived an attempted assassination in Sri Lanka in 2013, you have NO OPTION, if you feared for your life to heap praise on the ONE AND ONLY person who can both guarantee your safety or ensure you don’t live another second!!

So it with a sense of angst that I read the statement put out by the victim in this case Faraz Shauketaly – see link http://colombogazette.com/faraz-hails-mr-in-statement-issued-to-the-media/

It basically tells you NOT to come to any conclusion until the case is completed and the mystery of the attempted assassins solved. If this was said by all the prior victims we will be waiting for GODOT. So read this with a pinch of salt as a statement forced on him by his own judgment as the best course of action, and the best chance he may have for the mystery to be solved.

In truth it may not be the work of Govt. goon, but someone who had a grudge due to some journalistic expose. However the brazen nature of the incident in full view of foreign guests or at least with them being in the adjoining rooms in his guest house, meant that they were emboldened by some form of security guarantee against arrest or identification.

Further as Sri Lanka is now top of the list of world’s least safe for journalists, another attempt such as this is bound to give rise to a furtherance of that belief and not a lessening of it. Additionally the confidence of the general public on the ability of the Police to fully and impartially investigate the whole series of misdeeds against this profession in the past few years, is zero, and until and unless concrete results turn up to solve this and many of the previous crimes, all attributed to the Government, no matter what the victims say, will dissuade rational people from coming to any other conclusion than, the fact that the State has a hand in harming journalists to keep them under their control, and by these actions prevent them from speaking their minds. Journalistic freedom is non-existent in Sri Lanka no matter what anti govt. piece is written in the English media which the Govt. uses to show an international audience that Journalists are in fact free.

In the end what is fed to the majority is what is important. If the Govt. directly or indirectly controls what is written, the people of this country will never except by deduction work out what is going on in paradise. All is not well here in Paradise and it is up to people who understand to explain what coming to your own conclusion is all about.