[Channel 4 News]

Footage broadcast by Channel 4 News showing the alleged massacre of Tamil prisoners is evidence of “serious international crimes”, the UN says, as pressure mounts for an international investigation. A UN envoy has urged the international community and Sri Lanka to further investigate footage obtained by Channel 4 News purporting to show the summary executions of naked and bound men and women during the country’s civil war.

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[Channel 4 News]

Channel 4 is to screen Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, a special one-hour investigation which features devastating new video evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Sri Lankan government forces and the Tamil Tigers at the UN this Friday 3 June.

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[BBC]

The UN special investigator into extrajudicial killings in Sri Lanka says video footage showing soldiers apparently executing civilians is evidence of serious rights abuses. Christof Heyns presented the video footage to the UN Human Rights Council. He said that after careful analysis, he had concluded that it was authentic. The government has angrily denied his claims. It says that the video is a forgery and that the UN should let Sri Lanka hold its own inquiry.

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[Reuters]

Sri Lanka on Tuesday argued that the spread of terrorist groups worldwide requires a revamping of the international laws of war, which put governments at a disadvantage against foes that do not have to follow them.

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[Reuters]

A U.N. envoy said on Tuesday the international community as well as Sri Lanka should further investigate horrific footage apparently showing summary executions of naked men and women during Sri Lanka’s civil war. He stopped short of saying there could be an international war crimes case, but his comments raised pressure on Colombo to submit to an international inquiry into charges that war crimes were committed at the end of its 25-year war with guerrillas of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

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[BBC]

A Tamil policeman from northern Sri Lanka says he feels hurt that he and 25 Tamil colleagues were excluded from a recent parade of security forces. He said they were pulled out at the very last moment. He believes it was because of their ethnicity. But a police spokesman said there was no discrimination and it was “wrong” to say anyone was withdrawn. Meanwhile, a UN official says he thinks a controversial video, purportedly from the recent civil war, is authentic.

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[Reuters]

Sri Lanka’s trade unions on Monday threatened to shut down the Indian Ocean nation’s free trade zones after clashes between police and workers striking over a proposed private pension plan left at least 23 injured.

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[Reuters]

Video footage of summary executions apparently committed during the Sri Lankan civil war appears to be convincing evidence of “serious international crimes,” a U.N. special envoy said on Monday.

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[BBC]

Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa has defended the conduct of the military during fighting at the end of the country’s protracted civil war. He was speaking at a huge military festival in Colombo to mark the two-year anniversary of the government’s defeat of the Tamil Tiger rebels. A UN panel of experts recently accused both sides of war crimes during the last days of the conflict in 2009. The president rejected calls for an independent international inquiry. The BBC’s Charles Haviland in Colombo said that it was a defiant speech from a president who still garners great public support from the war victory.

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[HRW News]

Governments should decline the invitation to attend a Sri Lankan military conference that seeks to legitimize the unlawful killing of thousands of civilians during the armed conflict with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), Human Rights Watch said today. The Sri Lankan government has invited 54 countries to its “Seminar on Defeating Terrorism: The Sri Lankan Experience” from May 31 to June 2, 2011 in Colombo, the capital. The conference website says Sri Lankan military officials and panelists will “share their knowledge on Counter Insurgency and enumerate contributory factors in militarily defeating the LTTE.”

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