Sri Lankan police and the local authority said this Tamil street sign was vandalised
- This article is more than one year old.
- Published on December 4, 2019 at 07:15
- 4 min read
- By AFP Sri Lanka
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This Facebook post published a photo collage of street name signs in the Sri Lankan city of Panadura and a tweet screenshot on November 24, 2019, claiming that one shows the “original” picture and the other an “edited” picture.
The post has been shared more than 340 times.
Below is a screenshot of the misleading Facebook post:
The post's Sinhala-language caption translates to English as: “Mangala’s disgusting work.”
“Mangala” refers to Mangala Samaraweera, former Sri Lankan finance minister. He resigned from his ministerial position in mid-November 2019 after his United National Party’s presidential candidate lost in the presidential election.
The photo on the left shows a screenshot of Samaraweera’s tweet on November 22, 2019. The English-language tweet reads: “Barely one week since the election, the ugly face of majoritarianism is raising its ugly head again. Tamil street names have been removed. The country awaits your response, Mr. President.”
The tweet also includes photos of street sign names that are blank.
On the Facebook collage, a red arrow points at the tweet, with a Sinhala-language text which translates to English as: “Failing miserably at mud-slinging even after losing, Mangala mud-slinger’s bankrupt photoshop jobs.”
The image on the right side shows street name signs in Sinhala, Tamil and English. An arrow pointing at the image reads: “The original one”.
The Sinhala text at the bottom of the image reads: “Sir, gone are the days when you could Photoshop and fool people”.
The street name signs in the pictures show the sign of a street named Susantha Mawatha, in the city of Panadura.
The official languages policy of Sri Lanka stipulates: “The Sinhala and Tamil languages are both the official and national languages in Sri Lanka while English is the Link Language,” referring to the language used to communicate between the two ethnic groups. Street names have to be written in the three languages.
The same images were shared on Facebook here and here alongside a similar claim.
This claim is false; the Panadura urban council chairman and the Panadura South Police told AFP the Tamil-language street name sign was actually vandalised.
Nandana Gunathilaka, chairman of the Panadura Urban Council, told AFP by phone on November 29 that the street name sign was vandalised.
“We noticed the vandalisation on November 21; the street name signs are stickers, and the Tamil-language sign had been ripped off. I immediately lodged a police complaint and the police arrived at the site to inspect the area,” Gunathilaka said. He also said further inspections revealed there had been other attempts to vandalise Tamil-language street name signs in a similar manner.
Gunathilaka posted photos and a video of the vandalised street name sign on his Facebook page on November 21, 2019.
At the two-second mark of this 59-second clip, a police vehicle can be seen passing the vandalised sign.
Gunathilaka also uploaded a photo of the receipt issued after he lodged a police complaint about the vandalised sign on November 21, 2019.
Below is a screenshot of the receipt:
Gunathilaka told AFP that a few days later, an unidentified group restored the Tamil-language sticker.
“It is not a restoration that was carried out by the local government body. We suspect it’s the same group that tried to stir trouble in the first place. If you look closely, the colour and the font used in the new sticker is different to the original sticker,” he said. “It is the image of the mysteriously renovated name board that is now being circulated with the false claim that the vandalisation never took place.”
This Google Street View image, dated October 2015, shows the location of the street name sign.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the original name board as seen on Google Street View (L) and the street sign name pictured in the misleading posts (R). The shades of blue and the fonts used in the two photos are different.
Panadura South Police told AFP on November 29, 2019 it had launched an investigation to find the person or people who vandalised the sign.
Indian news outlet News18 reported on November 26, 2019, here that Sri Lankan Prime Minister ordered an investigation into Tamil-language street signs vandalisation cases.
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