Colombo: It took almost 55 years for a Sri Lankan man to get out of a mental hospital where he was sent by a court after being arrested for walking on road brandishing a sword.

Eighty-three-year-old Thantriye Emis Singho was arrested and had been referred to the Angoda mental hospital by Gampaha courts in western Sri Lanka in 1953 for walking on the streets in a Colombo suburb with a sword in hand.

Singho, a resident of Kosgama Bollathalawa in the region, spent more than half a decade in the mental hospital because no one had inquired about him after being referred to the hospital.

"Although he had been transferred to the cured persons unit at the hospital, no authority had inquired after him or produced him in courts," the Daily Mirror reported today.

Singho's plight was discovered by Human Rights lawyer Ireshika Gunawardena and social worker K Ranjani who were conducting a research at the hospital, it said.

They traced the man's relatives, including his sister T Sisilin Nona and niece T Seelawathie, and won a court order to secure his release last Thursday.

It had been found that Singho had been arrested at the age of 28 and spent time at the Angoda hospital since then.

It was early this year that an eighty-year-old Jamis hit headlines when it was found that he had spent more than fifty years in remand at the same hospital and was released subsequently, the newspaper reported. 

Source : PTI