Child’s remains found in Sri Lanka’s Chemmani mass grave

THE skeletal remains of a girl aged between four and five have been identified among 65 sets of human remains exhumed from a mass grave in Sri Lanka’s Jaffna district. The site first came into focus during the LTTE conflict in the mid-1990s.

“The findings of the excavation at the Chemmani mass grave were reported to the Jaffna Magistrate’s Court on on Tuesday (15) by Raj Somadeva, a forensic archaeologist overseeing the exhumation,” Jeganathan Tathparan, a lawyer, said on Thursday (17).

Earlier this year, the court ordered a legally supervised excavation at the site after human skeletal remains were uncovered during routine development work.

Tathparan said the child’s remains were found alongside school bags and toys. Somadeva informed the court that the remains were those of a girl aged between four and five, he added.

Two additional skeletons are also suspected to be those of children, based on similarities in clothing and anatomical features, the lawyer said.

The Chemmani site first attracted international attention in 1998, when a Sri Lankan soldier testified to the existence of mass graves containing hundreds of civilians allegedly killed during the conflict between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and the Sri Lankan government in the mid-1990s.

An initial excavation in 1999 uncovered 15 skeletons, but no further action was taken until the recent findings.

The gravesite is one of dozens unearthed across the country. Thousands of people died or disappeared during the 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009.

The main Tamil political party, Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), in a letter to president Anura Kumara Dissanayake, described the Chemmani mass grave as clear evidence of war crimes and “a genocidal campaign against Tamils”.

The excavation work, which was halted last Thursday (10), is scheduled to resume on July 21.

Amnesty International estimates that between 60,000 and 100,000 people have disappeared in Sri Lanka since the late 1980s.

The Tamil community in Sri Lanka claims that nearly 170,000 people were killed in the final stages of the civil war, while United Nations estimates put the figure at around 40,000.

The LTTE was seeking a separate homeland for Tamils.

(PTI)