On 12th June 1991, thepeople ofKokkadichcholai sufferedthrough a secondmassacre at the hands of
the Sri Lankan Army. The military entered a rice grinding mill and burnt the mill together with the
17 workers. 400 houses were damaged that day. More than 220 people were killed. Their bodies were burnt by the military using tires. 81 year old Karuvalthamby Ayilpodi was in the rice mill, the day of the massacre. Her
account is as follows: “I could hear blasts everywhere. I told my two sons, that we should run in
the direction of the crowd. As I said this, the Army had reached Patha Kullakattal, firing their guns. I was unable bear the pain of watching the army catch and hurt all the people that came their way. They set fire to the houses and pushed people into the fire two by two. Kulasegaram was with me at the time. They pushed me, Kulasegaram and another boy into a burning house. Even though we pleaded with our hands – they showed us no mercy. There were many sacks of rice in the house. Kulasegaram jumped on
top of this and jumped over the fence. He said that he would rather jump and break his legs and die than be burned to death. We jumped over the fence and hid. Having decided there was nowhere else to run, he said he would rather die there. We were surrounded by firing and crying noises. We ran behind the house and hid with our eyes shut tightly under the tin sheet. We could not forget the fear we felt when they pushed us into the burning house.”
Muthulingam Vimaladevi speaks of the horror and torture that happened that day:
“My elder sister’s baby was 12 days old. My elder sister said we should close the door and all stay inside. I said we should take the little baby and go to the mill as that was the direction everyone else was running in. So we took the baby and ran there. The mill was full. People were sitting in the middle, front and back. To stop the babies from crying, mothers but them to their breasts. Next door, we could hear bomb blasts. Everyone started saying ‘arohara’ and praying to god. The men who came inside started rapidly firing. Heads, stomach and necks were all being shot. I too pretended that I had been shot, smeared blood on myself and lay flat without moving. They shot everyone inside the mill. Along with my elder sister, five of us escaped. Because of the amount of the blood splattered everywhere, it looked as if everyone had died and we were able to escape. A little while after the firing stopped, we heard the sound of one mother crying out for her child. We stood up, took my elder sister’s child and ran to our next door neighbour’s house. There we saw people whose hands had been cut off, head had been cut and eyes had been gorged out. There were dead bodies of mothers who were still feeding their child. There was a baby smeared on the wall. The owner of the Mill, Mr. Kumaranayagam and his wife Puveneswary and their four children were all shot.”