Photo/Illutration On the evening of Feb. 23, 2021, Wishma Sandamali pleads with detention facility personnel to take her to a hospital. (Illustration by Kazuhiro Imura)

NAGOYA--As a sickly Sri Lankan woman spent her final hours exhausted and lying on a bed in an immigration detention facility, a nurse and guard in her cell discuss the good-looking doctor who recently visited. 

That is one of the many callous moments contained in video footage taken of Wishma Sandamali, 33, before her death at the Nagoya Regional Immigration Services Bureau facility on March 6, 2021.

The Nagoya District Court on March 3 decided that about five hours of footage will be shown in court on June 21 and July 12 in the lawsuit brought by bereaved family members seeking compensation from the central government.

An Asahi Shimbun reporter followed the procedures for going through lawsuit records to view the footage. While a written report about the treatment of Wishma was released in August 2021, it does not include details of what is captured on video.

A total of about 295 hours of footage of Wishma up until her death remains and five hours of that footage has been presented to the court as evidence.

Footage from Feb. 22, 2021, shows Wishma in such a weakened state that she cannot even drink water.

She tells a nurse in Japanese, “It is difficult to drink. It all goes outside.”

While the nurse tells Wishma she must take in fluids, the nurse is not shown providing her with any water.

Footage from the following day made clear what Wishma meant by “it all goes outside.”

She calls for a guard after repeatedly vomiting into a bag in her hand. She continued to vomit over the four minutes it took for the guard to come to her cell.

Wishma can barely say, “I am dying. Please call an ambulance quickly.”

The guard only says, “You aren’t going to die. You will be fine.”

That is when Wishma resorts for the first time to using her native Sinhalese to plead to be taken to a hospital.

The only thing the guard said was, “Let’s think about where you do not feel pain.”

According to her bereaved family, the Sinhalese word that Wishma repeatedly used is a desperate plea to save one’s life. Until then, she had conversed with those at the facility in Japanese.

Prior to filing the civil lawsuit, bereaved family members looked at the video footage and one of the most shocking scenes occurred at about 5 a.m. on Feb. 26, 2021.

While the written report does not provide details, the footage shows Wishma falling from her bed and calling to guards for help. But over the interphone, one guard says everyone is too busy to assist her at the moment.

The temperature in Nagoya at that time of day was 7.4 degrees. Wishma continues to call out about how cold the floor is, but she is so weak she cannot even reach the blanket on the bed to cover herself.

About 11 minutes after she fell, two guards finally show up at the cell. They try to help Wishma back onto the bed, but she cries out in pain. One guard tells her, “Try to endure it until morning” and the two leave her on the floor.

While the guards did cover her with a blanket, it did not extend below her shins.

The written report says Wishma complained a number of times of being cold, but without giving a reason.

On March 5, with Wishma barely moving next to a nurse and guard, the two exchanged comments about the appearance of doctors who worked at the facility in recent days.

At about 2:10 p.m. on March 6, a guard enters the cell, but Wishma does not respond. The guard addresses her using an honorific with her last name. Until then, most scenes had facility personnel dropping the honorific.

Guards can be heard saying Wishma’s fingers feel cold, with another asking if she has a pulse. But she does not respond even after being repeatedly called or shaken.

Her death was confirmed at a hospital about an hour later. 

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