COLOMBO, (Reuters) – Sri Lankan government doctors who gave civilian casualty figures to the media in the final months of the island nation’s 25-year war recanted yesterday after spending weeks under arrest.
The doctors’ statements that thousands were being killed raised diplomatic pressure on Sri Lanka to slow its assault in the final phase, fuelled a hotly contested propaganda duel and prompted Western calls for a war crimes probe.
Five doctors now in the custody of the Criminal Investigation Department said they were under pressure from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) separatists to give out exaggerated figures of people killed in military shelling.
“The LTTE threatened doctors to give information to the outside and sometimes they came with a list of numbers,” Dr. Thangarajha Sathyamoorthi told reporters.
Sathyamoorthi and four other colleagues now under arrest addressed journalists at the Defence Ministry’s Media Centre for National Security, which provides information to the press.
They denied they were under military pressure to recant, and said that less than 1,000 civilians died from late January to the end of the war on May 18.
The doctors were on the government payroll while serving in the war zone, but their personal safety was at the whim of Tamil Tigers.
