Updated

A Sri Lankan court has given permission to police to exhume the remains of a newspaper editor killed seven years ago for a fresh investigation.

Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper, was killed while driving to work in January 2009. He was an investigative journalist who wrote about government corruption and a sharp critic of the then government's conduct of a civil war with the ethnic Tamil rebels.

In a pre-written editorial published posthumously, Wickrematunge had said it will be the government that would kill him.

Privately owned Maharaja Television reported Thursday that police had asked court's permission to have the remains examined by a new medical team because the two doctors who operated on Wickrematunge and did an autopsy had given contradictory reports.