The Sri Lankan navy’s chief of staff, Rear Admiral Ravindra Tissera, with Lieutenant Colonel Shumpei Fujimura of US Space Forces Pacific. Photograph: Sri Lanka Navy
A delegation from the US Space Force has met the Sri Lankan navy’s chief of staff in Colombo to discuss “space domain awareness” and closer military ties, the latest in a string of US engagements with a military accused of war crimes against Tamils that has never been held to account.
The delegation from US Space Forces Pacific (SPACEPAC) and the US embassy in Colombo, led by SPACEPAC’s head of security cooperation, Lieutenant Colonel Shumpei Fujimura, called on Rear Admiral Ravindra Tissera at the navy’s headquarters on 19 October.
The meeting focused on “enhancing space domain awareness, strengthening military ties and discussing matters of mutual interest”, the Sri Lankan navy said. It ended with an exchange of mementoes. No further details were released.
The US delegation at the Sri Lankan navy’s headquarters in Colombo. Photograph: Sri Lanka Navy
The visit follows the sixth Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training (CARAT) exercise in July, hosted by the Sri Lankan navy at Trincomalee , the site of a naval facility documented as a torture centre, where eleven abducted young men, most of them Tamil, were held before they disappeared.
The naval base in Trincomalee. File photograph
The Sri Lankan president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, said earlier this year that the US military had requested to land fighter jets in Sri Lanka.
Washington has itself sanctioned senior Sri Lankan commanders. In 2023 it barred the former navy commander Wasantha Karannagoda from entering the United States over his involvement in gross violations of human rights linked to the abduction of the eleven youths. Karannagoda was arrested earlier this year in an unrelated probe.
Tissera and Fujimura exchange mementoes. Photograph: Sri Lanka Navy
In 2020 the US designated the former army commander Shavendra Silva over credible information of his involvement in extrajudicial killings during the final phase of the armed conflict, when tens of thousands of Tamil civilians were killed.
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