Impartial probe into Sri Lanka war critical: UN

The UN human rights office has called on Colombo to allow a full independent inquiry into a controversial video tape depicting alleged "extra-judicial killings" of Tamils by Lankan troops and said that such an investigation would be in the country's "best interests".

"We believe a full and impartial investigation is critical if we're to confront all the very big question marks that hang over this war," said Rupert Colville, spokesman for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

"Obviously if the Sri Lankan armed forces and the Sri Lankan government has done nothing wrong, it will have nothing to fear from an international investigation."

In May 2009, Pillay had called on Sri Lanka to probe allegations of war crimes imposed on the Lankan army during the final stages of the battle with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. This was before the tape surfaced.

UN Chief Ban Ki-moon's spokesperson, Martin Nesirky, has said Ban would look into the recent developments.

An independent UN expert said that the tape is authentic and called for the Sri Lankan government to undertake investigation on the tape.

"The conclusion very clearly is that video tape is authentic," Philip Alston, the Special Rapporteur on extra judicial killings, told journalists on Friday.

"The result of this analysis then would seem to point to the need for the government of Sri Lank to undertake the investigation that I had called for initially," Alston said.

Footage telecast on Britain's Channel 4 in August last year showed a Sri Lankan soldier shooting at point blank range a Tamil rebel who was bound and blindfolded.

The video also showed eight bound corpses, reinforcing allegations about extra-judicial executions on part of the Sri Lankan Army.

Colombo initially declared that the video was fabricated, but later conducted investigations that were widely discredited.

Dissatisfied with the Sri Lankan probe, Alston commissioned a number of independent experts, including forensic pathologists, firearms experts and forensic video tape analysts, and concluded that there was nothing to indicate that the video was fake.

Slamming the new report, Sri Lanka rejected its finding and criticised Alston for breaching protocol.

"We believe his conclusions are highly subjective and biased," Sri Lanka's Human Rights Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said.

"We believe he (Alston) is on a crusade of his own to force a war-crime inquiry against Sri Lanka," he said.