- COLOMBO: Sri Lanka said Thursday that it was counting on its own how many civilians were slain at the end of its bloody civil war to counter claims that tens of thousands were killed and fend off international calls for a war crimes probe.
Defense Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa also acknowledged for the first time that soldiers may have committed unspecified “crimes.” He promised to investigate and punish them.
Both the count of the killed and the admission of misconduct were a major shift for a government that had sworn its soldiers were beyond reproach.
Rajapaksa’s speech to a conference on postwar ethnic reconciliation was the government’s latest attempt to show it was taking action on its own and blunt the calls for outside investigations into the war against the Tamil Tiger rebels.
