He was of mixed ethnicity, his father Lucien de Zoysa a majority Sinhalese and his mother Manorani Saravanamuttu, a family physician from the minority Sri Lankan Tamil community.

At the time of his abduction and murder, de Zoysa was the head of the Colombo office of the Inter Press Service[1] He lived in the Welikadawatte housing estate with his mother, Manorani Saravanamuttu and associate A. V.

In 2005, Assistant Superintendent of Police Lal Priyantha Darmasiri Ranchagoda, Officer in Charge Bodeniya Gamlath Gedara Devasurendra and Sergeant Mahawedikkarage Sarathchandra were indicted for de Zoysa's murder.

[4] They were acquitted of all charges on 9 November 2005 by Colombo High Court Judge Rohini Perera; she stated that the evidence presented by the prosecution was "contradictory and not credible".

[5] de Zoysa's murder is widely believed to have been carried out by a death squad that was formed under the auspices of members of the government to crush the insurrection launched by the militant Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) organization.

[6] Rajiva Wijesinha, a political analyst and Secretary-General of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP), has repeatedly said that de Zoysa's murder was the turning point for the death squads.

[10] In this time, he hopes to retrieve a set of photographs, stored under a bed, and to persuade his friends to share them widely to expose the brutalities of the Sri Lankan Civil War.