Excution of Tamil prisioners by Sri Lanka Army
Video authentic – United Nations call for war crimes probe .
Sri Lanka was under new pressure on Friday 8th January
to submit to a war crimes investigation, after the United
Nations authenticated a video allegedly showing prisoners being executed by troops last year.
The Government of Colombo has faced repeated calls for a probe from Western countries and rights groups ever since it launched a final offensive to crush Tamil Tiger separatist rebels in early 2009.
The Sri Lankan Government said it concluded the video footage was fake, but Alston said the reports by three US-based experts on forensic pathology video analysis and firearm evidence “strongly suggest that the video is authentic.”
The experts concluded the footage of the apparent shootings showed the use of live ammunition, not blank catridges, and there was no evidence that the images of two people being shot in the head at close range had been manipulated.
Alston, however, said there were some unexplained elements such as the movement of certain victims in the video, 17 frames at the end and the date of 17 July 2009 encoded in it. But he offered some speculative reasons for why those could be explained away.
The US State Department has accused Sri Lanka’s government and rebels of possible war crimes in the killings of civilians during the fighting that ended in May.
UN spokesman Martin Nesirky backed the need for such a probe, saying on Thursday 7th that Alston’s conclusions show “the need for a credible, independent and impartial investigation into allegations of violations of human rights and international law by all sides in the conflict in Sri Lanka.”
An earlier call by the UN’s top human rights official, demanding an independent investigations into atrocities allegedly committed by both sides in Sri Lanka’s Civil war, has produced scant results.
