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Ayesha Thajudeen was one of the first people at the scene of her brother's accident. Police said that Wasim, a Sri Lankan national rugby player, was crushed against his car and burned to death inside. Looking at the charred vehicle around 4 am Ayesha was not so sure.
The car was sitting in a ditch; it was not clear what he had hit with enough force to ignite. Wasim's wallet was not found. A stranger discovered it later about 5 km away. The strangest of all: Wasim was sitting in the passenger's seat, she said.
"It was obvious from the moment I was taken to the site," explains Ayesha. "It was not a death, but a murder."
The death of 28-year-old Wasim Thajudeen was one of many victims of the Mahinda Rajapaksa era in Sri Lanka, which was to be re-examined by the police after the defeat of its strong leader in 2015.
On Tuesday, tens of thousands of people rallied in Colombo against the Sri Lankan president 's decision to dismiss Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and to install Rajapaksa in his stead.
Wickremesinghe refused to go and he and Rajapaksa rallied figures to the parliament to confirm them as legitimate Prime Minister when the Assembly resumed, currently scheduled for November 16.
Activists fear that Rajapaksa's return marks the end of a series of investigations, including a UN human rights resolution, for crimes allegedly committed during his arrest. reign, and would undermine the process of reconciliation after the civil war already broke down.
"The prospect of a Rajapaksa government is not good for accountability, democracy or the protection of human rights," said lawyer Bhavani Fonseka about the cries of protesters on Colombo Plaza Tuesday.
She added that many of Rajapaksa's investigations began after the end of her term, anyway in the past year. "But even those who move slowly will probably stop if Rajapaksa returns to the government."
The current president, Maithripala Sirisena, withdrew from the Rajapaksa government in 2014 to become the consensus candidate for the opposition. It has been touted as an alternative to the government accused of corruption, dissolving dissidents in white vans and intimidating the media.
Sirisena's victory the following year was hailed as a new page for Sri Lankan human rights and for relations between the country's Buddhist majority and the Tamil population after a 27-year civil war.
His government eased pressure on the media and NGOs, pledged to end abuses by security agencies and co-sponsored a UN resolution whose demands included international trials for soldiers accused of atrocities during the war. He also agreed to reopen the investigation into the death of Wasim Thajudeen.
Members of the new government claimed that Thajudeen had been murdered by Rajapaksa's security forces, possibly after getting scrambled with family members. Rajapaksa has denied the accusations and says that they are motivated by political considerations.
The new probe initially sparked Ayesha's hopes. But over the past year, the investigation has been bogged down in bureaucratic and legal delays. She thinks the case is deliberately slowed down. "I feel very sad," she says. "I do not think I'll see the end of this."
The progress of the Thajudeen inquiry shows a general lack of action on the part of the government in the field of human rights. Lawyers such as JC Weliamuna attribute this fact to the fact that the same military and civilian bureaucrats of the Rajapaksa era remained in the new government.
"There was political will, but no bureaucratic will," Weliamuna said.
The government has also faced resistance from within. He added that the ultranationalist forces within the Sirisena administration have fought their efforts to comply with the UN investigation. Similarly, the "elite forces" within Wickremesinghe's more pro-business party have delayed financial reforms, he said.
"Whenever there was a reform movement, it was contested both within the government and externally," he says. "People feel terribly disappointed."
In the northern and eastern regions that are still recovering from the war, the lack of progress in settling displaced persons, lifting the excesses of the security forces or dismantling the army a deep disappointment.
In July, a UN Special Rapporteur criticized Sri Lanka for failing to comply with the commitments made in the UN resolution that it had committed to implement. .
"There is a feeling of apprehension here," said Ravindra de Silva, head of the Association for Friendship and Love, a group of youth based in Vavuniya, in the north of the country. "People are waiting to see what happens next, who will be in control and what kinds of changes there will be.
"Nothing has been decisive in terms of reconciliation and other related issues such as the missing. So we were disappointed anyway. Now this has turned into a sense of betrayal and foreboding that old methods might come back. "
Rajapaksa's return could raise questions about the key trials of family members and associates scheduled for the coming weeks: one against his brother, Gotabaya, who was a dreaded defense secretary of the previous government, and another from his former chief of staff.
Post-war reconciliation agencies, such as a new office dedicated to the search for some 20,000 missing persons during the war and another office set up to decide on reparations, are also potentially concerned.
A senior officer of a post-war reconciliation agency told the Guardian that he feared his work would be strangely strangled. "Political will matters," he said. "Our funding is allocated in government budgets, so any downward trend in funding would have an impact."
Ayesha Thajudeen said that she had virtually lost all hope of finding out who had killed her brother. And if Rajapaksa returns to power? "We'll never know," she says.
