Seventeen employees of the French INGO Action Against Hunger (known internationally as Action Contre la Faim, or ACF) were shot at close range in the city of Muttur, Sri Lanka, close to Trincomalee on this day in 2006, in what is now known as the Muttur Massacre.  The victims included sixteen minority Sri Lankan Tamils and one Sri Lankan Muslim.

The bodies were discovered after the town of Muttur had come under the control of the government forces. There was fierce fighting between government forces and rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)  orces the previous week prior to the discovery of the bodies.

The Sri Lankan government denied responsibility for the massacre, but the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission suspected that the Sri Lankan Army was responsible for the killings. According to the SLMM,  ” …  [it] is convinced that there cannot be any other armed groups than the security forces who could actually have been behind the act”. The outgoing head of the Mission, the retired Swedish Colonel Ulf Henricsson, said that this was “one of the most serious recent crimes against humanitarian aid workers worldwide”.

Action Against Hunger, the non-governmental organization for whom the victims worked, termed it a war crime.

In September 2006, under increasing pressure from the international community to investigate this incident, Sri Lanka President Mahinda Rajapaksa announced the formation of a Commission of Inquiry with a mandate to look into 15 specified alleged violations, including the Muttur massacre of ACF staff. With the dubious track record of previous Commissions of Inquiry in mind, a group of bilateral donors negotiated for the formation of a group of International Independent Eminent Persons (IIGEP) that, invited by the president, have the mandate to observe the investigations of the Commission of Inquiry. Australia nominated an Eminent Person (EP).

On April 1,2008, the University Teachers for Human Rights (UTHR), which is run by former teachers at the University of Jaffna—known to be openly critical both of the LTTE and the Government of Sri Lanka—in their ‘Special Report #30’,  which exclusively deals with the massacre of ACF staff, named one member of the Sri Lankan Home Guard—now the Civil Defence Force—and two Police Constables based in the Muthur Police Station as perpetrators. The report also noted that several Sri Lanka Navy Special Forces were part of the group that entered the ACF compound and remained passive as the ACF staff were murdered.

-Wikipedia