Sri Lanka Office on Missing Persons verifies 23,352 records

Sri Lanka’s Office on Missing Persons (OMP) has compiled a verified database of 23,352 missing individuals after consolidating thousands of duplicate records. OMP Chairman Mahesh Katulanda reported that the database includes 16,966 active cases involving civilians, alongside separate records for missing military and police personnel.

The OMP, established to resolve cases of enforced disappearances, faced significant challenges due to a lack of centralized data and historical manual record-keeping. To address these issues, officials have conducted face-to-face meetings with 9,072 families. Many of the disappearances are linked to the country’s decades-long military conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which ended in 2009.

The government has allocated 375 million rupees to support outreach and has provided one-time interim relief payments to more than 5,700 families. The OMP plans to expand its reach to cover between 13,000 and 14,000 families by the end of the year and has been authorized to recruit 69 additional staff members, including legal officers and investigators, to accelerate operations.