Allaipiddy is one of the islets off the Jaffna coast. Following clashes between the Sri Lanka military and the LTTE near Allaipiddy, the military fired indiscriminately towards the PhilipNeri church where people had taken refuge. The total death toll which many say was very high remains unrecorded to this date. The Parish Priest of the PhilipNeri church, Fr Jim Brown, who witnessed the entire shelling incident, was later disappeared by the Sri Lanka military.
See also: PUBLIC AI Index: ASA 37/025/2006, 12 September 2006
One young girl who wishes to remain anonymous later wrote about her experience caught up in this shelling. Her writing is important because there are no other recording of the events of that night. According to her, they felt trapped as the shelling exploded all around them. They sought safety in the PhilipNeri church. Then the SLA persons came to the church and promised to escort the people to Jaffna. What the SLA did was to use the people as shields and then once they neared their own camp abandoned the people who had to dodge shells and find their way back to the church. The SLA repeated this a few times before people realized what they were actually doing. A few hours later shells came directly at the church. There was fire from the naval gunboats as well. Many people were by now dead. Children lost parents. After the carnage when Fr Jim Brown tried to recover the bodies but the Navy obstructed it. To date the exact number of people killed has not been recorded.
This same PhilipNeri church was at the centre of another large scale disappearance in the 1990 which is covered in Section 71 of this book.
Available names of victims (name, age)
1. A John Robert, 41
2. K Mary Manjula, 45
3. K Menis, 19
4. K Michael, 55
5. K Nadaraja, 60
6. K Thevakumar, 28
7. K Uthayakumar, 35
8. L Gnanapragasam, 70
9. M Ramesh, 26
10. P Thevanayaki, 30
11. P Velicia, 20
12. S Anandam, 51