The Human Rights Watch (HRW) today called for an investigation into war crimes allegations against the LTTE, starting with a probe into the role played by its former deputy leader, now a Sri Lankan deputy minister.

The New York-based rights watch group has termed “cynical” the call for probe by Vinayagamurthi Muralitharan aka Karuna, currently the deputy minister of resettlement in the UPFA coalition led by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, given the minister’s alleged “prominent” role in the war crimes.

“The Sri Lankan government should act on the call by a government deputy minister to investigate war crimes by examining his own role in serious abuses”, a statement said.

“Karuna’s call for war crimes investigations should not allow him to airbrush out his own role in atrocities. His LTTE forces were implicated in some of Sri Lanka’s most horrific abuses, so the government’s long-stalled war crimes investigations might as well begin with him”, HRW Asia Director Brad Adams said.

In June 1990, 400 to 600 police officers who had surrendered to LTTE forces, many of whom may have been under Karuna’s control, were bound, gagged and beaten. The LTTE then executed the Sinhalese and Muslim police officers among them, the HRW said.

The group says Karuna has admitted in an interview with the BBC that the LTTE committed these killings, but claimed he was not at the scene.

Under the legal principle of command responsibility though, Karuna could still be criminally liable for the massacre even if he was not physically present, the HRW maintains.

The global watchdog also charges that Karuna’s forces played a prominent role, routinely visiting Tamil homes to tell parents to provide a child for “the movement“.

The LTTE harassed and threatened families that resisted, and boys and girls were abducted from their homes at night or while walking to school, it says.

“Karuna has enjoyed immunity for some of the worst atrocities committed during Sri Lanka’s long conflict,” Adams said.

“His threat to initiate investigations against a political party is a cynical gesture aimed at silencing the opposition while denying his own responsibility for war crimes,” he said.

Earlier this month, Karuna called for war crimes investigations into the Tamil National Alliance, an opposition coalition of ethnic Tamil political parties, presumably because some members had links to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Karuna was effectively the second-in-command of the LTTE and the head of its Eastern Province forces until he broke away from the group’s leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, in March 2004.

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