Army Accused of Collusion in Sri Lanka Child Abductions

The Sri Lankan army has been colluding in the abduction of hundreds of children to train and fight against Tamil Tiger guerrillas in the country's intensifying war, according to the independent monitoring group Human Rights Watch.

Based on interviews with escaped children and their parents, the HRW report builds on allegations made recently by Unicef.

The allegations are a severe embarrassment to the Sri Lankan government, which is struggling to find a response before the UN security council discusses the issue next month.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which is fighting for Tamil autonomy, has been using child soldiers for many years, some as young as 11. Unicef has received the names of almost 6,000. The Sri Lankan government always denounced this as a sign of the Tigers' cruelty. "The government is now complicit in the same crimes. Its collusion on child abductions highlights its hypocrisy," said Jo Becker, child rights advocate at HRW.

Up to 600 children have been seized in the Batticaloa district since June last year, the report says. The kidnappers are members of an armed Tamil faction which broke from the Tigers three years ago. Led by V Muralitharan, otherwise known as Colonel Karuna, who was once the Tigers' main commander in Sri Lanka's eastern districts, the group works closely with the Sri Lankan army.

Although the army denies this, the Karuna group's camps are near Sri Lankan military bases and its soldiers often wear government uniforms. Some 48 mothers submitted a list of names of abducted children to Sri Lanka's supreme court last summer.

There are claims the army pressed many of the mothers to change their evidence and say the kidnappers were "an unidentified armed group".

In other cases parents say the police refuse to register complaints of abductions.