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Sri Lanka hit by fresh allegations of civilian deaths
AFP - Saturday, May 30
COLOMBO (AFP) - - Sri Lanka faced fresh allegations on Friday that its army had killed huge numbers of civilians during its offensive against the Tamil Tigers, as well as complaints it was continuing to block aid workers.
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Britain's Times newspaper said its investigation into the blistering war on the separatist rebels pointed to more than 20,000 Tamil civilian deaths, most of them killed by army shelling in the final weeks of the conflict.
Citing aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony, the paper said the final stages of the conflict saw 1,000 civilians killed each day up to May 19, when the corpse of rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was shown on television and the war declared won.
The Sri Lankan government angrily dismissed the report.
"These figures are way out... What we think is that these images are also fake. We totally deny the allegation that 20,000 people were killed," defence ministry spokesman Lakshman Hulugalle said.
The Sri Lankan army has denied it used heavy weapons and has blamed any civilian deaths on the Tigers, who have been widely condemned for holding people as human shields.
The United Nations has made confidential estimates of about 7,000 civilian deaths up to the end of April, but French newspaper Le Monde cited UN sources as saying the full figures were not made public to avoid a diplomatic storm.
The UN humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) responded by saying civilian deaths were "unacceptably high," but denied a cover-up.
"The UN has publicly and repeatedly said that the number of people killed in recent months has been unacceptably high and it has shared its estimates with the government as well as others concerned," OCHA spokeswoman Elisabeth Byrs told AFP in Geneva.
"The point is the UN has not been shy about the scale of human suffering and civilian casualties. It has been ringing the alarm bells for a long time."
A week before the last Tiger territory was overrun, the International Committee of the Red Cross had also described an "unimaginable humanitarian catastrophe."
The UN meanwhile complained that Sri Lanka's government was still refusing to provide aid workers with full access to hundreds of thousands of displaced Tamil civilians despite an appeal by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Ban, who visited the island last weekend, had sought complete freedom for international aid agencies to help civilians uprooted from their homes by the offensive against the now defeated Tamil Tigers.
"We still don't have access beyond the north of Omanthai (in the island's north)," UN resident coordinator Neil Bhune told reporters in Colombo.
"We have been advised that it is not safe for us to go beyond that, to go into the former conflict areas."
About 260,000 ethnic Tamils displaced by the fighting are being held in camps ringed by barbed wire and security forces, who say they need to weed out former rebel fighters disguised as civilians.
The renewed international concern surrounding Sri Lanka's defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) came after the island managed to torpedo Western demands for a probe into alleged war crimes.
At a special session of the UN's Human Rights Council held this week in Geneva, Colombo managed to lobby Asian support and push through a resolution hailing the military victory.
Nevertheless, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay maintained her demand for an investigation.
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