Sri Lanka’s former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was accused in a report released Thursday of tampering with police records in order to hamper investigations into mass graves discovered in an area where he was a military officer at the height of a bloody Marxist insurrection in 1989.
The report by activist groups including the International Truth and Justice Project, Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka, and Families of the Disappeared said even though hundreds of remains were unearthed in some 20 exhumations of mass graves in the past three decades, no action has been taken to identify the victims and return their remains to their families.
The mass graves were suspected to date from the time of a violent Marxist insurrection in 1989, when Rajapaksa, as a military officer, was involved in counter-insurgency in the region.
Sri Lanka has faced three major armed insurgencies, including a 25-year separatist civil war, since gaining independence from the British 75 years ago.
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