London, Mar. 24 (ANI): Tamil political prisoners are increasingly tortured in Sri Lanka with some detainees dying in custody after suffering prolonged abuse, a new investigation has claimed.
The report found that thousands of ethnic Tamils have been held without trial since 2009, when Sri Lanka's military finally crushed Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) rebels in a decades-long conflict for control of the island's northern Jaffna peninsula, the Guardian reports.
According to the new report by the London-based Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice, since then the Sri Lankan Government has regularly flouted laws and violated promises of post-conflict reconciliation through systematic abuse of prisoners, many of whom had no links to the Tamil Tigers.
More than 100,000 people were killed on both sides of Sri Lanka's 26-year territorial war between minority Tamils and troops from the Sinhalese majority government.
Both the rebels and government forces were accused of widespread atrocities during the fighting.
The findings will intensify pressure on Britain to withdraw from a controversial summit to be held in Sri Lanka later this year.
Pressure is mounting on government with calls for the Queen and David Cameron to boycott the Commonwealth heads of government meeting to be hosted in Colombo in November.
According to the report, on Thursday, the UN's human rights council passed a resolution highly critical of Sri Lanka's record.
The resolution asked Sri Lanka to conduct an independent and credible investigation into alleged war crimes with a previous UN investigation, saying up to 40,000 people were killed in the final five months of fighting alone.
The report documenting the island's human rights abuses was undertaken by Tamil and Sinhalese researchers from Sri Lanka and London.
It specifically examined the treatment of detainees in the wake of a riot in the country's Vavuniya detention centre last June, that triggered brutal police retribution, the report added. (ANI)
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