ITJP report alleges massacre of over 300 wounded LTTE fighters after Ananthapuram battle
COLOMBO – A damning new report released by the International Truth and Justice Project (ITJP) alleges that more than 300 severely wounded Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) fighters were massacred after being left behind in a single building when the Sri Lanka Army overran Ananthapuram in April 2009.
Titled ‘The Battle of Ananthapuram’, the report is compiled from firsthand testimonies of survivors from the final phase of Sri Lanka’s civil conflict.
According to the findings, hundreds of injured combatants had congregated at the LTTE’s computer centre on the eastern edge of the besieged Ananthapuram pocket during the dying days of the battle. The report states they were left behind on April 3, 2009, and vanished without a trace thereafter.
“The wounded were alive when I left. They had no rifles, explosives, or cyanide,” one survivor recounted to the ITJP.
Another witness, who trained alongside more than 30 of those left behind and remained in contact with their families, stated: “They never came back. We never thought they would kill all of those people. We later learned that the wounded people left behind there were burned alive.”
Marking over a decade and a half of unresolved allegations, ITJP Executive Director Yasmin Sooka emphasized that fresh witness accounts have punctured years of silence surrounding the incident.
“For years, we believed that no one had survived Ananthapuram to testify about the massacre. However, some of those who survived have now broken their silence,” she said, stressing that military victory confers no licence to kill the wounded.
Seventeen years of impunity cannot extinguish criminal responsibility, she said urging Sri Lanka to disclose what happened in the past and bring those responsible for the violations, including commanders, before justice.
–ENCL
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