UK: HR grp concerned about Lanka massacre evidence

London, June 26: At least one of 17 Sri Lankan aid workers massacred last year was shot with a type of weapon mainly used by the military, but evidence has been tampered with and the bullet has disappeared, a rights group said.

The local staff from international aid group Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger) were trapped in the northeastern town of Muttur by fighting between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels in August.

Their bodies were found in the group's compound, shot execution-style.

The government has denied involvement in the killing and says a presidential commission is probing the deaths. But international observers say the inquiry is going nowhere and Nordic ceasefire monitors blame security forces.

The International Commission of Jurists an international body of lawyers who have been observing the inquiry have slammed the government's investigation into the killings, complaining that security forces in the town at the time were not even interviewed, among other irregularities.

They said yesterday the report of an Australian pathologist invited by the government showed clearly that a single 5.56 mm bullet was recovered from one of the corpses alongside many more larger 7.62 mm rounds.

Shortly afterwards, it could no longer be found and seemed to have been replaced.

''The circumstances I have outlined afford powerful grounds to suspect that someone removed from the exhibits a bullet he thought might be incriminating and substituted another,'' British barrister Michael Birnbaum wrote in a report released overnight.

While 7.62 mm rounds are fired by AK-47 assault rifles used by both sides, 5.56 mm ammunition is used for American M-16 rifles that are much rarer in Sri Lanka.

Tiger rebels occasionally use the M-16, but it is much more commonly seen in the hands of police Special Task Force troopers or military special forces.

Sri Lankan Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona told sources the government believed the Australian pathologist had been mistaken and said that while the commission and criminal investigation were moving slowly, that was not surprising.

''What do you expect when even the Yugoslav tribunal took 18 months to get its procedures in order?'' he said. ''Hopefully we will see a lot more progress over the next few months.''

Call For Urgent Probe

Birnbaum wrote that there should be a probe into who had access to M-16 weapons and 5.56 mm ammunition, including government security forces present in Muttur.

''There should be an urgent and thorough investigation into who had access to the exhibits and who tampered with them,'' he added.

''Those responsible should be held accountable and the integrity of the evidence should be restored.'' The massacre was the worst attack on aid workers since a 2003 bomb attack on the United Nations in Baghdad.

Two Red Cross local staff from the Tamil minority were abducted and killed in June and aid agencies now routinely list the island still recovering from 2004 tsunami as one of the most dangerous places to operate after Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Since a 2002 ceasefire collapsed last year, several thousand people have been killed and hundreds of thousands displaced.

Reuters

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