Records of persons fleeing Vanni destroyed by Special Action Committee of Basil Rajapakse

[TamilNet, Saturday, 29 May 2010, 19:51 GMT]
The Special Action Committee (SAC) of Basil Rajapakse, the brother of President Mahinda Rajapakse, the present Sri Lankan Economic Development Minister and the former senior advisor to the President during the war on Vanni, had ordered the records of all persons who fled Vanni at the end of the war to be destroyed so as to conceal the recorded particulars of more than 17,000 persons who were suspected as Liberation Tigers and who had later disappeared without any trace, an official of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Resettlement (MDMRS) said. Rizard Badudin who was then the minister of the above ministry is alleged to have functioned as a puppet in the hands of Basil Rajapakse in destroying the records, sources close to MDMRS officials who had recorded the details of persons fleeing Vanni said.

It is alleged that Basil Rajapakse and the Sri Lanka Army (SLA) officers who had personally supervised the recording of the details of all the persons fleeing Vanni had caused the said records to be destroyed in an effort to keep the international community in the dark of the facts, the sources added.

The officials of MDMRS who had recorded the details of all the persons fleeing Vanni say that they now have only the list of persons presently held in the SLA detention centres.

The details of the fleeing persons were carefully recorded by the MDMRS officials at different places under the supervision of SLA, as they kept coming out of Vanni.

These records had been destroyed by SLA on the orders from their superiors, the MDMRS officials said.

MDMRS maintains only the list of persons now held in the SLA detention centres as the official recorded documents of persons who had fled Vanni at the end of the war on Vanni.