29 May,2009 12:49 PM IST | | PTI
Over 20,000 trapped Tamil civilians were killed as the Sri Lankan Army launched its final assault to end the country's nearly three decades old civil war with the LTTE guerrillas, a media report said today.
An investigation by The Times newspaper has revealed that the figures of over 20,000 civilians killed in the final stages of the civil war, most as a result of government shelling, is three times the official figure. Blaming the civilian casualties on the LTTE rebels, authorities in Colombo have insisted that the army halted the use of heavy weapons on April 27 and observed the no-fire zone where 100,000 Tamil men, women and children were sheltering.
However, the report claimed that aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony present a clear evidence of an atrocity that comes close to matching Srebrenica, Darfur and other massacres of civilians. It said the army, without the scrutiny of the world s media and aid organisations which were kept well away from the war zone, launched a fierce barrage that began at the end of April and lasted about three weeks.
Confidential United Nations documents obtained by the British daily record nearly 7,000 civilian deaths in the no-fire zone up to the end of April. According to sources with the world body, the casualties then surged, with an average of 1,000 civilians killed each day until May 19, the day after Tamil Tigers supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed in fierce fighting, the report said.
The figure concurs with the estimate made to The Times by Father Amalraj, a Roman Catholic priest who escaped from the no-fire zone on May 16 and is now among the 200,000 other survivors in Manik Farm refugee camp, which is among the largest camp sites hosting internally displaced persons. It would take the final toll above 20,000.
"Higher," a UN source was quoted as saying by the Times. "Keep going." The report said one photograph shows the destruction of the flimsy refugee camp, with sand mounds showing makeshift burial grounds. Independent defence experts, who analysed dozens of aerial photographs taken by the paper, said that the arrangement of the army and rebel barrage positions and the narrowness of the no-fire zone made it unlikely that LTTE's mortar fire or artillery caused a significant number of deaths.
"It looks more likely that the firing position has been located by the Sri Lankan Army and it has then been targeted with air-burst and ground-impact mortars," Charles Heyman, editor of the magazine Armed Forces of the UK, was quoted as saying by the British daily. However, the Sri Lanka has rejected these allegations.
"We reject all these allegations. Civilians have not been killed by government shelling at all. If civilians have been killed, then that is because of the actions of the LTTE [rebels] who were shooting and killing people when they tried to escape," said a spokesman for the Lankan High Commission. The overall scale of relief operation in Sri Lanka remains huge. Last week, the government announced that its military operation against the Tamil separatists had ended.
