Assailants of journalists have proved that they are above the law. They have stepped up attacks on the media during the past few months but the police are still groping in the dark trotting out various excuses for their failure to apprehend any suspects.

It looks as if the members of the Fourth Estate had to take care of their own security. The latest incident where the Sri Lanka Press Institute Course Coordinator Namal Perera and Political Officer of the British High Commission Mahendra Ratnaweera were attacked on Monday has prompted the Newspaper Publishers' Association to offer five million rupees for information leading to the arrest of the assailants. If they go on offering such cash rewards with people coming forward to bag them by providing required information, they run the risk of going bankrupt before long, given the high incidence of attacks on media personnel, which always leave the police clueless. We hope the day won't dawn when proprietors of media institutions and journalists will have go beyond offering bounties, capture perpetrators of violence against them and hand them over to the police.

Free media activists have argued that until the culprits are brought to justice, the government remains the suspect. The conduct of some ruling party politicians like Mervyn the Terrible surrounded by his Oprichniki notorious for their anti-media frenzy bolsters that argument.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa, speaking at a public rally in Potuvil the other day, called Monday's attack a conspiratorial attempt to tarnish the image of his government and reverse the gains the military has made against the LTTE. The government thinking is that there is a well orchestrated vilification campaign by terrorists and their allies to isolate Sri Lanka internationally and invite foreign intervention to provide the LTTE with an escape route.

If one goes by the government's conspiracy theory, then journalists are being subjected to terror strikes aimed at weakening the State and promoting separatism. Therefore, one may argue, investigations into them must be given the same priority as other terror attacks like bomb blasts and the assassinations of VIPs. But, why is it that the police don't attach such importance to attacks on poor scribes?

The police consider them ordinary probes not worthy of extra effort, as could be seen from their claim that it is difficult for them to proceed with the investigation into the abduction of Keith Noyahr, as he has not made a statement––obviously for fear of reprisal from his abductors.

The government says several 'special' police teams have been deployed to arrest the assailants of Perera and Ratnaweera. It is not the number of police teams that matters but whether the police will be able to make a breakthrough or not. So far, all probes into the attacks on the media, save one or two, have drawn a blank. The present probe, too, is very likely to be put on the back burner, when it is eclipsed by some other issue, and then relegated into the limbo of forgotten things with the passage of time.

Conspiracy or no conspiracy, the only way the government, which has become the main suspect in the attack at issue, can clear its name is to conduct a thorough probe and apprehend the assailants. There is no other way!