An Indian ferry with a capacity for 1,044 passengers docked at Colombo's port this morning after leaving Tuticorin port.

The ferry will initially operate twice a week, with the journey taking about 10 hours each way, said W. Chandradasa, a director of Sri Lanka's Shipping Corp. Another vessel will be added soon, he said.

Officials said a Sri Lankan ferry would also make the journey within two weeks, and the service could be boosted to three round trips a week, depending on passenger traffic.

"(This) will be beneficial to the economic, social and cultural advancement of the two countries," Sri Lanka's Ports Ministry said. "With the end of the three-decade war in Sri Lanka, the tourism industry has gained impetus and is expected to have a boost from this ferry service."

Ferry services between India and Sri Lanka stopped in 1982 due to civil war, which ended in 2009.

According to the agreement, ferry services between Sri Lanka's northwestern town of Talaimannar and India's Rameshwaram would also resume, but Ports Ministry officials did not give a date as infrastructure in war-hit Talaimannar is still being rebuilt.

Sri Lanka's $50 billion economy is on an economic revival path after the end of the fight against Tamil Tiger rebels in May 2009. Sri Lanka has been trying to establish economic ties with India after having turned down demands by South Indian Tamils to halt the war in its final phase.

India and China are increasingly competing for lucrative and strategic investments in Sri Lanka since the end the war after both of them provided military assistance, including ammunition, in the final phase of the war.

In another development, Sri Lanka dismissed as fake a new documentary to be shown on British television on Tuesday, alleging atrocities were committed in the island's war with Tamil rebels. The Defense Ministry in Colombo said the videos, to be broadcast publicly for the first time on Channel 4, were a fabrication and cited a forensic video analyst on its website as saying that they were extensively edited.

The footage was shown privately to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva earlier this month and has been available on the websites of a number of Tamil lobby groups and human rights organizations.

What appeared to be the same images were also shown by Al-Jazeera television in November. The Doha-based channel said it obtained the images from an unnamed Tamil source who said they had been taken by a member of Sri Lanka's military.

Channel 4 last December broadcast a five-minute video of the bodies of women in a muddy field and said they were killed by government forces.

The footage was an extension of another video shown by the broadcaster in 2009 in which troops appeared to shoot two blindfolded men.

Sri Lanka has persistently rejected the footage as a fabrication to discredit its army. Army chief Lt. Gen. Jagath Jayasuriya this month offered to probe "specific allegations" of war crimes.

The island nation's government has previously maintained that no civilians were killed by its troops and there was no need for an investigation.

The UN has said up to 7,000 civilians were killed in the final months of fighting when government forces crushed the Tamil Tiger leadership in a no-holds-barred military offensive that ended in May 2009.