UK Worked With Sri Lankan Security Forces 

During The Final Stages Of The War – Report

October 16, 2013 

“Two senior PSNI officers were deployed as ‘critical friends’ of the Sri Lankan regime around the time of a civilian massacre by government forces in 2009. Documents reveal how the UK worked with Sri Lankan security forces during the final stages of the bloody civil war which devastated the country.” Belfast Telegraphreports.

British police secretly advised the Sri Lankans since the Thatcher era, with visits to the Royal Ulster Constabulary’s headquarters during the Troubles and early guidance from an ex-MI5 director on counter-insurgency strategy.

It was previously revealed how 3,500 Sri Lankan police officers – including some senior commanders – received training from the Scottish Police College since 2007.

It has now emerged UK police training in Sri Lanka continued even during the bloodiest months of the war.

The links to Northern Ireland were revealed following a Freedom of Information request to the PSNI by Corporate Watch, a not-for-profit research group.

Meanwhile the corporatewatch.org yesterday said; “In February 2009, Sri Lanka was an island at war. After nearly three decades of conflict, the separatist Tamil Tiger rebels were being cornered by government forces, in what has become known as the ‘killing fields’. 300,000 ethnic Tamil civilians fled the fighting, only to be rounded up and ‘screened’ for militant sympathies in squalid barbed-wire internment camps. By August 2009, Amnesty International warned that this system of indefinite and arbitrary detention included some 50,000 children.

To read the CorporateWatch’s Freedom of Information request to the PSNI click here

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