Sri Lanka rejects UN's conclusions on video purporting to show army's execution of Tamils

Sri Lanka said Friday that a video purportedly showing its troops killing blindfolded, naked Tamils during the civil war was a fabrication and dismissed as biased a U.N. investigation confirming its apparent authenticity.

Philip Alston, a U.N. human rights investigator, said Thursday the footage was probably real, and called for a war crimes investigation into the final bloody months of the war between the government and ethnic Tamil rebels that ended in May.

The revived focus on possible wartime abuses has deeply angered the government and could complicate the island nation's efforts to refocus international donors' attention on its costly postwar rebuilding plans.

"We don't accept his conclusions, and we believe his conclusions are highly subjective and biased," Sri Lanka's Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said of Alston. "We believe he is on a crusade of his own to force a war crime inquiry against Sri Lanka."

Samarasinghe said the government's own investigation into the footage showed it was filled with "discrepancies and shortcomings," and he accused Alston of not following "proper procedures" before announcing his conclusions.

"First thing he should have done was to share the information with the concerned country. But, he hasn't done that," he said.

The video, which appeared to show the summary execution of Tamils by Sri Lankan troops, was shot by a Sri Lankan soldier in January 2009 using a mobile phone, according to the group Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, which released the footage. Britain's Channel 4 television first aired the video in August.

The Sri Lankan government dismissed the footage as fake, but Alston, the U.N. Human Rights Council's investigator on extrajudicial, summary and arbitrary executions, said reports by three U.S.-based independent experts on forensic pathology, video analysis and firearm evidence "strongly suggest that the video is authentic."

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