Claim: A video clip of an interview of the President elect Anura Kumara Dissanayake where he says that the killings of journalist Thevis Guruge and actor/politician Wijaya Kumaratunga can be justified because they happened during the Civil War.
Fact: The video clip is misleading. The full interview shows Dissanayake saying that all killings in the recent history of Sri Lanka must be investigated.
An X post with a video clip from Independent Television Network (ITN) showing an interview with the President elect Anura Kumara Dissanayake has been going viral. The video clip is one minute 43 seconds long, and claims that Dissanayake justified the killings of journalist Thevis Guruge and actor/politician Wijaya Kumaratunga as they happened during the Civil War.
The text at the bottom of the clip alleges in Sinhala that Dissayanake is also of the opinion that any killings committed by the JVP, too, must therefore not be examined.
Newschecker noticed that this claim is also viral mainly on X (formerly Twitter), with over 10,000 views since it was posted on 15 September 2024. A few such posts can be seen below.
Also read Viral Image Showing Meththika Vithanage And Sajith Premadasa Is Edited
Fact check/Verification
The Newschecker team began by conducting a keyword search on the words ‘ITN’, Anura Kumara Dissanayake’, ‘Thevis Guruge’, and ‘Wijaya Kumaratunga’ and came across the video of the original interview on the Facebook page of ITN posted on 3 September, 2024.
Anura Dissanayake had been interviewed by the ITN for their programme ‘Hard Talk with Sudharman’. Four minutes and five seconds into the interview, Dissanayake mentions that if and when he and his party win the election, they will ensure that all people affected by instances like the Easter Attacks in 2019 and the assassination of journalist Lasantha Wickremetunge in 2009 would be examined. He mentions that he sees these two acts as instances of ‘state terrorism’.
Then the interviewer asks him a follow-up question about the murders of Thevis Guruge and Wijaya Kumaratunga, which happened in the late 1980s during the JVP insurrections, before the Easter Attacks and Lasantha Wickremetunge’s death.
Dissanayake can be heard answering that the murders of Guruge and Kumaratunga are different since they happened during the Civil War, but, regardless of the circumstances, all deaths caused by state terrorism need to be examined and the relevant parties need to be brought to justice. The portion where Anura calls for a probe into all instances of deaths due to terrorism, has been omitted and his statements have been presented in a misleading way.
Conclusion
We thus find that this X post with a video clip claiming that Anura justified the killings of journalist Thevis Guruge and actor/politician Wijaya Kumaratunga as those that happened during the Civil War, is missing context.
Result: Missing context
Our sources
Verified Facebook account of ITN Sri Lanka
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