Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [6]
We’ve hired a Sri Lankan newspaper reporter named Chris to help us get around, and when I ask him about kidnappings, his eyes light up. “Oh, yes, it appears a very big problem,” he says, his British-accented English accompanied always with a peculiarly Sri Lankan shake of the head.
Chris shows us a headline on the front page of one of Sri Lanka’s daily papers: TWO KIDS, RESCUED FROM WAVES, KIDNAPPED BY MAN ON MOTORCYCLE.
“There have been a lot of stories like that,” he says. “It’s all very dramatic stuff.”
“Is it true?” I ask.
“I have no idea,” he says, “but it makes for a great headline.”
When we check with police, it turns out there have only been two complaints of child abductions filed with authorities, and neither of those cases has been confirmed. We decide to track down the story about the two kids kidnapped by the man on the motorcycle.
Sunera is seven, his sister Jinandari is five. They haven’t been seen in nearly two weeks.
“I believe that they’re alive,” their aunt tells us when we track her down in Colombo. She speaks in a whisper and clutches a photograph of Jinandari dressed as a ballerina.
Sunera and Jinandari were in a car with their parents when the tsunami hit. The wave swept them off the road, carrying their car like a piece of driftwood some three hundred yards into a water-filled ditch. It ended up submerged upside down underwater, not far from the Lighthouse Hotel and Spa, a strikingly modern waterfront hotel near Galle.
When we arrive, the place is packed. It somehow survived the storm, and is now filled with reporters. They’ve converted the parking lot into a satellite-feed point. When we finally locate the manager, Ananda de Silva, he tells me, quite confidently, that the children are dead.
“From our staff, three people came and tried to turn the car,” he tells me, pointing to the now dried-out ditch. “We couldn’t do it, but after about thirty minutes, we were able to get the girl and boy out.” The parents were dead, de Silva says, stuck in the car underwater. When they got Sunera out he was dead as well. Jinandari was unconscious.
“Her eyes were shut, her head like this,” de Silva says, flopping his head forward.
“The paper says the children were kidnapped by a man on a motorcycle,” I say, showing him the headline.
He waves his hand at the front page. “That is just rumor,” de Silva says, insisting that he saw Sunera’s body handed over to Sri Lankan soldiers passing by in a truck. As for Jinandari, he says a man named Lal Hamasiri took her to the hospital on a motorbike.
Lal Hamasiri lives a short distance from the hotel. When we arrive, he is at first unwilling to speak, furious that local papers have made him out to be a kidnapper.
“I saw the child lying on the ground,” he finally tells us, beckoning us into his home, away from the prying eyes of suspicious neighbors. “I immediately picked her up and gave her mouth to mouth. She had some white foam on her lips.”
At the urging of the crowd, he flagged down a passing motorcycle and took the girl to a nearby hospital. “The body was a little warm, and I believe she had a slight pulse,” he says, but by the time they got to the emergency room, he was sure she was dead.
“I went up with the good intention of saving someone’s life but in return I got a very bad name, and everyone looks at me like I’m a criminal, like I’m a kidnapper.”
At the hospital, it quickly becomes obvious how a little girl can go missing. The emergency ward is washed away. Hospital beds sit abandoned in the courtyard, waterlogged papers and medical records litter the ground.
A short, squat man in a sparkling white suit waddles out of the main door, trailed by a fast-moving entourage; UN relief workers, Sri Lankan underlings, a few local news crews try to keep up with him.
“That’s the fucking minister,” our guide, Chris, tells me, pausing