COLOMBO, 7 March 2007 — Sri Lankan policemen and soldiers, as well as underworld figures, have been arrested in connection with a rash of killings and abductions in the latest chapter of the two-decade civil war, police said yesterday.
The admission comes as the government faces mounting pressure from human rights groups and foreign governments to halt rights abuses blamed on elements of the military as well as Tamil Tiger rebels and renegades, and after the discovery of five corpses in the island’s north.
“The magnitude of the problem is yet to be assessed. But the fact remains there are a few groups like this operating,” Asoka Wijetilleke, deputy inspector general of the police’s foreign intelligence department, told a news conference.
“Some of them, which include ex-soldiers, serving soldiers, police officers and underworld gangs and other organized elements have been arrested,” he added. “That does not mean we have fully and completely investigated the whole thing.” Government officials were not immediately available for comment.
Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Commission says nearly 100 abductions and disappearances have been reported to them so far this year in the capital Colombo, the eastern district of Batticaloa and the besieged northern Jaffna Peninsula.
That in turn comes on top of 1,000 cases reported during 2006 since the resumption of a civil war that has killed around 68,000 people since 1983.
Some see a parallel between abductions in well guarded government-run areas and a rash of disappearances when the then government crushed an uprising by hard-line Marxists in the late 1980s — and see state involvement.
Inspector General of Police Victor Perera said more than 400 people had been arrested as part of a police operation to crack down on abductions and disappearances since September, but did not say how many of those were serving members of the security services.
“There is a lot of attention by foreign organizations on the human rights situation here and these killings and abductions cause big problems for the government internationally,” Perera told the news conference. “We suspect that they are being done to discredit the government.” Police have found five dead bodies dumped in the past week in Colombo and the northcentral district of Anuradhapura. Police have not yet identified the victims found in Anuradhapura yesterday, whose faces were badly burned.
