Colombo tries to blunt calls for war 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.