Sri Lankan army begins shooting displaced civilians

"A Sri Lankan soldier poses for a propaganda video while an injured Tamil man is dying inside the Truck. After finishing the video he piles the dead childs body on top of the injured Tamil man without concern for the living."


We are receiving reports from the Vanni of numerous cases where the Sri Lankan army has opened fire on Tamil civilians who were trying to come to the area of government control. In all of these cases, the Sri Lankan government claims it was the LTTE who fired on the civilians.

If this were true, the civilians would not be able to recover the bodies of the dead. If the shooting took place in the LTTE controlled area, how did the families recover the dead bodies with the LTTE standing there next to them firing. How did the families manage to carry those bodies for many kilometers while supposedly being shot at by the LTTE.

The fact that the bodies are with the civilians at the military checkpoints shows the shootings occured near the checkpoints, and the culprits are the Sri Lankan military. In each case a nervous or angry soldier opens fire on the civilians, untill another soldier stops him, resulting in the deaths of many civilians. After the firing, the remaining relatives are allowed to collect the body and continue on to the military controlled area where they are held under military guard. No one is allowed to meet and speak to the witnesses, as they do not want it to be known that the government was responsible for the shootings.

As usual, newspapers like The Hindu, who's reporters are known to receive a regularly monthly payment from the Sri Lankan government, printed the story exactly as the Sri Lankan government claimed. They didn't feel it necessary it investigate or hear from witnesses.

In the case of the recent suicide bomb attack on Sri Lankan soldiers at Dharmapuram, the government claims 8 civilians were killed in the blast. This is a complete lie. All of the civilians killed died when Sri Lankan soldiers opened fire on the waiting civilians with machine guns after the blast. In the video shown by the Sri Lankan government, not a single soldier's body is in the area of the dead Tamil civilians. There are no blast signs around the dead bodies. With the exception of one chair, all the plastic chairs have no damage at all. If a bomb blast had occurred in that area, these plastic chairs would have been blown to bits. There is a dead body still sitting in a plastic chair, and his body is covered in blood, but the plastic chairs next to him are completely unharmed. This is again proof that he was killed by machine gun fire, not by a bomb explosion. Furthermore, the ground surrounding the dead bodies shows no signs of an explosion. The fact is the explosion took place far away from where these civilians were killed. The killing of these Tamil civilians was a retaliatory strike by angered Sri Lankan soldiers.

Another important point to note in the video is how the injured were treated. They claim the injured civilians were immediately flown by helicopter to specialty hospitals for emergency treatement. But even by the time the news camera man arrived, there was still a severely injured Tamil civilian in the back of a truck. You can see him in the last frames of the video shown by the Sri Lankan government. They made this severely injured civilian lie bleeding to death while they staged their propaganda film. In the end they pick up the dead body of a child and dump it on top of the injured civilian, showing no concern for him at all. We should note that all of the injured soldiers had already been cleared from the area. Even the dead bodies of the soldiers had been cleared out, yet the injured Tamil civilian was still lying there dying as they piled dead bodies on top of him. This is the real treatment the Sri Lankan army gave to the injured Tamil civilians.


"An injured Tamil man lying naked in the road. If this is how a Tamil civilian is treated in the propaganda photo shoot, imagine how he will be treated once the camera leaves."

The U.N., who remained silent for a month despite daily killings of innocent Tamil civilians by artillery bombings, was suddenly quick to condemn the human bomb. Why hasn't the U.N. been condemning the attacks by the Sri Lankan government on Tamil civilians every day for the last one month? When bombs were falling on the PTK hospital, the only thing the U.N. could say was "we aren't able to tell which side fired the shots." Everyone knows which side has been bombing the PTK hospital. But the U.N., despite seeing that the artillery shells were coming from the government side, still insisted they didn't know who to blame. In the case of the civilian deaths after the suicide bombing, the U.N. was able to quickly blame the LTTE without the need for an investigation into the facts. This is the supposed impartiality of the U.N. in Sri Lanka.