COLOMBO, 15 October 2006 — The bodies of 15 aid workers massacred in Sri Lanka will be exhumed next week in a fresh bid to determine who killed them, their French employer said yesterday as sporadic fighting continued in the troubled north of the island.
The aid victims were among 17 mostly Tamil workers with the Paris-based Action Against Hunger (ACF) who were gunned down Aug. 4 at their offices in eastern Sri Lanka’s Muttur town.
The bodies of two of the dead have already been exhumed and sent to Colombo. The remaining bodies are expected to be retrieved Wednesday, ACF said in a statement.
“The exhumation will occur on the 18th October and will make possible a new post mortem ... the bodies should be transferred to Colombo the same day,” the charity said.
Australian experts are expected in Colombo next week to be present at the autopsies, principally as observers and advisers, the ACF added.
The killings came during a period of heavy fighting between the government and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE).
The 13 men and four women, aged 23 to 54, worked mostly as engineers on water sanitation and farm projects for the charity.
Nordic truce monitors have blamed the killings, the worst attack against aid workers since the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003, on government forces. The government has denied any role in the massacre, which forced ACF to drastically scale down its operations in Sri Lanka amid an upsurge in violence that continues to plague the region.
Sporadic artillery firing erupted in parts of the northeast Friday and yesterday, capping a week that saw some of the worst fighting since the 2002 cease-fire.
The pro-rebel TamilNet website also said Sri Lankan Army jets had carpet-bombed a village in Tamil Tiger-controlled territory.
The attack on Muttayankattu village in Mullaitivu district killed 10 cows and devastated a large swath of farmland, TamilNet said, adding the jets carried out six runs, dropping 48 bombs over a two-hour period Friday morning.
It was one of the biggest raids to hit the region, TamilNet said, and followed a flare-up in violence in which the government suffered record losses with 130 troops killed in clashes earlier in the week.
