Word: somarama
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...Colombo last week, a Buddhist monk and herbalist named Talduwe Somarama mounted a prison scaffold and was hanged. Somarama's crime: the 1959 assassination of Ceylon's Prime Minister Solomon W. R. D. Bandaranaike. In a confession he later retracted, Somarama said he committed the deed because the Prime Minister favored Western medical techniques over Oriental herb medicine. Prison officials reported that 24 hours before he was hanged, Somarama had himself baptized a Christian so that he could ask God for the forgiveness of sin that cannot be found in the Buddhist religion...
Disregarding "Banda's" dying wish, a Ceylon judge last week sentenced Tal-duwe Somarama, 45, to death. But the trial had proved that Somarama had been only the triggerman; the instigator and chief plotter had been Mapitigama Buddharakitha, 41, high priest of the Kelaniya temple outside Colombo...
Casting about for a triggerman, he happened on Talduwe Somarama, who was both a monk and a practicing ophthalmologist. As a Buddhist, Somarama was exasperated at the Prime Minister's delay in fulfilling his campaign promises to Buddhism. As an ophthalmologist, he was anxious to have his contract at the State Indigenous Hospital renewed, and therefore needed Buddharakitha's good offices, for the widow Wijewardene had put the high priest on the hospital's appointment board. Plainly, Somarama was Buddharakitha...
...Assassin Somarama straightforwardly declared: "I have done this thing to a man who did me no wrong-for the sake of my religion, my language and my race." High Priest Buddharakitha truculently declared that he had been railroaded. The judge unhesitatingly sentenced both Somarama and Buddharakitha to hang...
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