CAT/C/57/D/605/2014 Complainant’s comments on the State party’s observations 6.1 On 15 May 2015, the complainant contested the State party’s assertions of his lack of credibility. He reiterated his real fear of suffering inhuman treatment if he were to be removed to Sri Lanka, as his close family members had been targeted by the Sri Lankan police and navy and by gunmen suspected of being members of the Karuna group. 6.2 In an annex to his comments, the complainant submitted a death certificate 12 and post-mortem report in respect of Mr. S.K, and a statutory declaration describing his relationship to Mr. K. While the Refugee Review Tribunal had referred to Mr. K. as a “distant relative”, he was in fact a close friend of the complainant who then married into the complainant’s extended family. He adds that Mr. K. was known by the Sri Lankan security forces to be a member of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam due to his travels during the ceasefire between 2002 and 2006. The complainant was known to have travelled with him on two journeys to the area that was at that time controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. During the second journey, the complainant’s name and identification documents were specifically noted by an officer at the Vavuniya checkpoint as someone travelling with Mr. K. The complainant was threatened at that point. Although the officials at the checkpoint only took down the complainant’s name and identification number, when he reported to the Jamalia office of the Criminal Investigation Department, after he had been looked for by two men in civilian clothes in his mother’s house, he was shouted at and threatened that after the ceasefire of 2002 came to an end he would be looked for again. The threat was designed to make him confess on the question of whether Mr. K. had met with Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam members during their trips to Kilinochchi. 6.3 The complainant maintains that the circumstances of Mr. K.’s death are suspicious. He was allegedly shot by the police after a magistrate had ordered his release from prison. It is very unlikely that, once the order for his release came, Mr. K. would have attempted, as the police claimed, to escape, entirely unnecessarily and risking his life to do so. After the killing of Mr. K, the complainant and his relatives were told that the body would be released to them at the cemetery. Although the coffin was sealed, the complainant and his relatives broke the seal, opened the coffin, and saw his mutilated body with some of the internal organs placed to one side inside the coffin. That same night, the complainant was taken by the Criminal Investigation Department for interrogation about the trips that he had made with Mr. K. to areas controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and about the nature of their relationship. He was also questioned about why he had broken the seal on the coffin and explained that he wanted to make sure that the family was burying Mr. K. He claims that he was beaten with a plastic chair and kicked during one or two hours of interrogation. Nothing else happened to the complainant until October 2011, when two men in civilian clothes came in a white van to his mother’s house to look for him, in vain. As the complainant felt insecure in early 2012, he started moving around and staying in different houses. Thereafter, his mother-in-law organized for him to take a boat from Mannar to India and from there to Australia. 13 The complainant adds that the Refugee Review Tribunal found that the evidence concerning his treatment after the 2008 killing of Mr. K. was contradictory, in large part because he did not discuss this in the entry interview. He considers this finding to be completely unrealistic, as many asylum seekers, especially those who are young and have come by boat, are very frightened of immigration officers carrying out the entry interviews and do not trust them. The complainant had considered his experience with the murder of his family members to be a sufficient explanation of his difficulties. In addition, he claims that the agents who organized the boats told people what they should say and should not say. Such instructions were usually followed in entry interviews, until such time as the asylum seeker could eventually gain trust in the country’s 12 13 GE.16-09596 Indicating the date of death of Mr. K. as 12 June 2008. See paras. 18-25 of the statutory declaration (annex B). 7