Human rights agency calls for international war crimes investigation in Sri Lanka

New York, May 23(ANI): Human Rights Watch, a New York-based agency, has called for an international war crimes investigation in Sri Lanka one year after the country's military crushed the Tamil Tigers' 26-year insurgency in a brutal five-month campaign.

The agency, which probes rights violations around the world, said that photographs and witness accounts it has collected "demonstrate the need for an independent international investigation into violations of the laws of war."

"Yet another feckless commission is a grossly inadequate response to the numerous credible allegations of war crimes," The Globe and Mail quoted Elaine Pearson, the agency's acting Asia Director, as saying.

Human Rights Watch is the second international group to call on the UN to back an outside probe of war crimes allegations in Sri Lanka.

Earlier, the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based agency, had released a report claiming "credible evidence" that Sri Lanka's military deliberately shelled civilians, hospitals and humanitarian operations between January and May last year, during which foreign observers were expelled as the army moved to finish the Tigers once and for all. (ANI)