British Mercenaries Probed Over Sri Lanka War Crimes

British Mercenaries Probed Over Sri Lanka War Crimes

BRITISH MERCENARIES – The Metropolitan Police are currently probing British mercenaries who were involved in the Sri Lankan civil war.

According to BBC, Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), a private security company, trained the Special Task Force (STF), an elite unit of Sri Lankan police in the 80s. They were trained to fight against Tamil separatists.

STF has been cited in a number of abuses in the human rights. Among the abuse include the executions without trial and killings of Tamil civilians.

The probe is said to be the first time that the British mercenaries were probed by the Metropolitan police, a UK force which takes the roll for investigating accusations of war crimes or human rights abuses.

The Met spokesperson had received a referral regarding alleged war crimes that were committed by the said mercenaries. It had launched an investigation after a scoping exercise.

Much of the evidence regarding the involvement of KMS in Sri Lanka came from declassified UK government documents and freedom of information requests which were submitted by journalist Phil Miller. Allegations of said crimes by the KMS were detailed in Miller’s book “Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes”.

The probe was closely followed by the 200,000 strong Tamil community in the UK, with most of them fled to London during the civil war in Sri Lanka, based on the report.

“A lot of Tamil people became refugees in the 1980s, that’s when KMS were there,”

“People remember being attacked by helicopter gunships so I think people are quite shocked to learn that in many of those cases helicopters were flown by British mercenaries.”