Vandals Target Tamil Newspaper

In an otherwise non-descript industrial building in Scarborough, large sheets of plywood sit in the front windows of Tamil newspaper Uthayan.

Vandals smashed the double-paned glass of the Progress Avenue offices overnight, apparently to threaten and intimidate the editor.

“I was at home and I got a call at 7:30 (in the morning),” said Logan Logendralingam, who is also the paper’s publisher.

“They said, ‘I hear your friends went to Colombo and met the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, who is an enemy of Tamils and who has killed thousands of Tamils in the northern part of Sri Lanka. We don’t like that. So we have done something to your office. That’s a message for you.’”

Uthayan recently covered a meeting between Rajapaksa and Kula Sellathurai, President of the Canada-Sri Lanka Business Council and the United Tamil Council of Canada.

Sellathurai had been in the country delivering funds for children who had been orphaned and displaced.

Logendralingam says he does not know who could be responsible for the attack, but this is not the first time his newspaper has been targeted. He has vowed to continue his work delivering news to the Tamil community.

“I’m very sad and I’m frustrated. I’m not going to stop the newspaper. I’m not going to stop what I’ve been doing for the past 15 years,” he said.

The damage to the building is estimated at $10,000.