Sri Lankan massacre: over 20,000 refugees slaughtered

Sri Lanka's authorities say their forces stopped using heavy weapons on April 27 in a no-fire zone where an estimated 100,000 Tamil civilians were sheltered and blamed civilian casualties on rebels hiding among the civilians, the paper said.

Citing confidential U.N. documents it acquired, The Times said the civilian death toll in the no-fire zone soared from late April, with around 1,000 civilians killed daily until May 19. That was the day after Vellupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), was killed.

Sri Lanka completed barred foreign journalists and aid agencies from the north of the country during the fighting. This allowed the army to use excessive force in civilian areas without any concern on collateral damage or civilian casualties.

The no fire zone set up, in the areas of intense fighting, to allow besieged civilians to find shelter and safety were not spared from the heavy bombardment by the army despite claims that the army stopped using heavy weapons. Pictures released by Times show Tamil Tiger gun placements merged with the civilian refugee dwellings. The Tigers sandwiched their positions between the civilian shelters and the sea. The pictures reveal the close proximity between the refugee shelters and the Tamil Tigers and the destroyed remains of the rebels' weapons in the midst of civilian camps.

The Sri Lankan government has adamantly maintained that no civilians were harmed, Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, Mahinda Samarasinghe, claimed that despite the heavy fighting, "all Tamil civilians have been rescued without shedding a drop of blood". However, it is feared that the final civilian death toll could be more than 20,000, said the paper.

It has emerged from independent defence experts who analysed dozens of photographs taken by the Times that the arrangement of the army and rebel firing positions and the narrowness of the no-fire zone made it unlikely that Tiger 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," said Charles Heyman, editor of the magazine Armed Forces of the UK to the Times.

UN call for investigation ignored

U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights Navi Pillay has said the LTTE recruited child soldiers and used civilians as human shields during the conflict, while the military had indiscriminately shelled areas packed with civilians.

The West, especially the European Union has strongly pushed for an independent enquiry into the allegations of abuses by both parties. However, Sri Lanka has called the Western-led push for rights and war crimes probe hypocrisy and a violation of its right to destroy the LTTE, which is listed as a terrorist organisation by more than 30 countries.