Colombo: The Sri Lankan military on Monday dismissed as "concocted" a report claiming that LTTE Supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran was tortured before he was executed after he "surrendered" to the Army.
The Sri Lanka Guardian, a US-based website, had reported last week that "the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran had surrendered to the Army in the final stage of the war without swallowing the cyanide capsule tied to his neck".
The report, quoting a "senior Defence Ministry source in Colombo", claimed that the "credible" evidence obtained from the source "reveal that the Tiger chief was barbarically slaughtered by a senior Sri Lankan Army officer".
The Lankan military described the report as "concocted stories, replete with hypotheses and utterly false fabricated stories."
"The latest were a series of purposely planted such stories and e-mails being published in a website called ‘Sri Lanka Guardian’ in which a new version to the consequences that led to Prabhakaran's death has been concocted.”
"Defence authorities flatly reject contents of these fabricated stories and are planning prosecution against those publishers in accordance with legal provisions that have already been published," the Media Centre for National Security said in a statement.
According to the official version, LTTE supremo was killed in a gunbattle with government forces. The military crushed the rebels in May, ending three decades of civil war that killed over 80,000 people.
Amid a US report "detailing incidents" of alleged rights violation during the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka, the US government has been asked by an American Tamil advocacy group to create an international investigation mechanism and impose trade sanctions on Colombo.
The US Department of State submitted a Congress mandated report last week "detailing incidents during the recent conflict in Sri Lanka that may constitute violations of international humanitarian law or crimes against humanity, and, to the extent practicable, identifying the parties responsible."
Sri Lanka, which has rejected the US report as baseless, said "anti-Sri Lanka elements with the sinister motive of trying to take the security forces to a War Crime tribunal and tarnishing the image appear to be resorting to reinvigorated 'e-mail' propaganda gimmicks".
Bureau Report