At approximately 12:30 a.m. on April 29, 1992, between thirty and forty Tamil Tiger fighters attacked the Muslim village of Alanchipothana. Their first target was a police post on the outskirts, manned by twenty-six policemen, twelve Home Guards, and thirty-five volunteers. Most of these armed defenders fled into the rice fields and jungle when the shooting started. The attackers then moved into the sleeping village. They shot and hacked to death civilians in their homes. When it was over, fifty-four bodies were found at Alanchipothana, including twenty-five women and twenty-one children under the age of ten. Eight more of the injured died later in hospitals at Polonnaruwa, Kandy, and Colombo.

By 6 a.m., Home Guards and policemen who had survived the Alanchipothana attack reached the police post at Karapola, a Tamil village. They informed the officers there of what had happened. What followed was not defense or pursuit of the LTTE fighters - it was collective punishment. The combined force of policemen and Home Guards went to Muthugal, another Tamil village, and began killing civilians. They shot and hacked to death dozens of villagers, then moved to Karapola and did the same. At around 9 a.m., they returned to Muthugal and continued. Fifty-one villagers died at Muthugal, including thirteen children under ten. Thirty-eight villagers were killed at Karapola. The army camp at Welikande, just nine kilometers from Alanchipothana, was informed at 6:30 a.m. It took until 10 a.m. for soldiers to arrive at Muthugal and stop the killing.

What makes the Polonnaruwa massacre records so harrowing is the specificity. The victims were not anonymous - they were documented, named, aged. At Muthugal: T. Geetha, 14. K. Kanaganathan, 4. S. Mangayarkarasi, 2. T. Regan, 3. At Karapola: Janakie, 8. Subakar, 7. Sudharshan, 7. At Madurangala, where Home Guards found Tamil villagers who had fled Muthugal hiding in rice fields, six people were arrested. The woman was released. On April 30, the bodies of the five men and one local resident were found in an irrigation canal. These were families - parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren - killed because of their ethnicity.

The Polonnaruwa massacre illustrates the Sri Lankan civil war at its most grotesque: atrocity begetting atrocity, with civilians bearing the cost. The LTTE's attack on Alanchipothana killed Muslim villagers who were not combatants. The retaliatory massacres at Karapola and Muthugal killed Tamil villagers who had no connection to the LTTE attack. Both the government security forces and the LTTE were blamed. Amnesty International documented the events under the title 'Deliberate killings of Muslim and Tamil villagers in Polonnaruwa.' The three-and-a-half-hour gap between when the army was notified and when it arrived to stop the retaliatory killings raises questions that have never been fully answered. The war ended in 2009, but the names on those lists remain - each one a person who woke up on an ordinary morning in a village in eastern Sri Lanka and did not survive the day.