Anatomy of a tragedy

Text by R. Wijewardene
Pictures by Thusitha Kumara

Appi ude paandara nagittaa — we woke up early — we washed, we did our homework, then we got dressed and had breakfast. After breakfast, we got into the van.  My father started the engine, but the van didn’t move. He tried the engine again, and then BOOM — everything shook and then went blank. I woke up in the hospital.” 

Nethmi Kulasena’s day began like that of any other school child in the island — with homework, breakfast, and a  freshly-ironed uniform — but, in the milliseconds after her father turned the key of the family’s van for the second time, the 10-year-old’s morning was transformed into a nightmare that will remain etched in her mind forever.  

At 6:45 am, as her father, Nishantha Kulasena, was about to set off for school, an explosion tore through the van, turning the Kulasena family’s morning commute into a scene of absolute carnage.

The ‘boom’ that Nethmie mentioned incinerated the van she was seated in and reduced her parents’ home to rubble.  Eight children were wounded in the explosion, including five  passengers and three younger children who had been playing outside the van.  Four parents who had come to drop their children off for school also suffered injuries, along with the van’s driver.  One of the children, 12-year-old Erandika Dissanayake, later died from the injuries she sustained in the blast.  

Initial reports

Around the country, initial reports of the bomb blast caused fear and panic as millions of people faced the terrifying prospect of a return to the days of arbitrary violence,  fear and death. 

However, subsequent police investigations revealed that the explosion in Kurunegala was in all probability not linked to terrorism and was most likely the result of a personal dispute. 

While it has been reported that the van was a school van, it was actually a van taxi belonging to Nishantha. Nishantha simply used the van to drop his children and the children of his relatives at school every morning before waiting for hires in Kurunegela town.

The van contained members of a single family and was parked in the family home. As such, this was an extremely personal attack.

But what sort of a grudge or personal vendetta could have inspired anyone to deliberately target a van packed with young children? (The youngest victims were less than a year old.)

 “We have no enemies, and we don’t know who could have done this to us — to our children,” said N. Kulasena, Nishantha’s father. 

 The scale of the explosion was clearly extraordinary. The van was reduced to a twisted and empty hulk, while the front portion of the Kulasenas’ robust house was reduced to a pile of rubble.  

Four kilos

The Kurunegala police claimed that four kilos of explosives were used in the blast — a horrifyingly large figure for a personal dispute. Such a large bomb could only have been planted with the intention of wiping out the entire family. 

“Whatever good deeds we and our children committed in our past lives, that’s what saved them,” said Chandana Kuranasinghe, an in-law of the van’s driver and father of two of the injured children. “One child, my wife’s older sister’s daughter, was killed, and that’s a terrible tragedy. But for the fact that the others are still alive we are deeply thankful. When I heard the explosion and ran to the scene of the blast I didn’t think there was a chance for any of them.

“Why, why did this happen to us?” Mrs. Kuranasinghe wailed as she sat by her badly-burned nine-year-old son. “We aren’t involved in anything violent. Why did they hurt our children?”

Her cries were soon joined by the laments of the other mothers whose children were caught in the morning’s carnage. They repeated the same plaintive moan: “aiy, aiy? (why?)”

The cries echoed through the Kurunegala General Hospital. The whole facility is littered with children whose lives were shattered in the morning’s blast — innocent young bystanders, who stand  little chance of ever understanding whatever adult dispute lay behind the atrocity.  

The nation will ultimately heave a collective sigh of relief as it hears that Friday morning’s explosion was the result of a personal dispute, and not part of a wider terror campaign. But one family, far from being relieved, will struggle to piece together lives that, like their home and van, were utterly shattered at 6.45 on an ordinary Friday morning.