Ceylon: To Find Forgiveness
In 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.
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