2ND LEAD (Adds details)

Sri Lanka attempts to stop ABC from airing Channel-4 video

[TamilNet, Sunday, 03 July 2011, 13:31 GMT]
Sri Lanka Government run weekly, Sunday Observer, said the current edition that Sri Lanka’s High Commission in Australia has sent a letter of protest to ABC’s Australia Broadcasting Corporation's] Four Corners Program requesting "to avoid telecasting the documentary [Channel-4's "Sri Lanka's Killing Fields"] as it is completely biased and contains unsubstantiated allegations against the Government of Sri Lanka."

The program is scheduled for telecast on ABC Monday.

Acting High Commissioner Shashikala Premawardena, who also had a telephone conversation with ABC's Executive Producer Sue Spencer, had urged the ABC not to give any coverage to the video as the views expressed in the documentary were without any guarantee of authenticity, the paper said.

"The footage screened by Channel 4 last night ranks among the most horrific yet shown on British television. Naked prisoners shot in the head; the dead bodies of women who had been raped, dumped on a truck; the immediate aftermath of a shell landing on a hospital – images caught on mobile phones of the atrocities committed by government soldiers in the final months of Sri Lanka's brutal civil war," UK's popular daily The Guardian commented on the video.

Amnesty International said of the authenticity of the vide in its website, "Amnesty International considers the previous and new mobile phone videos to be credible evidence of war crimes. The United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions has also concluded that the video is authentic."

Chronology:


External Links:

JP:		Sri Lanka: Confronting the killing fields
Amnesty:		Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields
guardian.co.uk:		Cricket and the Killing Fields
Guardian:		Lifting the lid on Sri Lanka's war crimes
IBTimes:		Channel 4 "Sri Lanka Killing Fields": Is the US war on terror responsible?
Amnesty:		‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields’ – shocking the UN into action
Ray Cook:		Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields – what genocide actually looks like