Sri Lanka War Toll Near 6,500, Un Report Says

The United Nations says nearly 6,500 civilians have been killed and 14,000 wounded in fighting in Sri Lanka over the last three months, according to a UN document circulated among diplomatic missions.

Two UN officials privately confirmed the figures to the Guardian today. At least 2,000 people are understood to have been killed in the last month but the death toll does not include all of those killed in this week's intense fighting. The UN has declined to publicly release its casualty figures.

The quarter-century civil war has flared in recent months as government forces pushed to crush the Tamil Tiger rebels in their remaining territory in the north.

According to the UN figures, 6,432 civilians have been killed in the fighting since 20 January and another 13,946 have been wounded.

The government denies allegations – supported by credible witness evidence from aid agencies as well as Tamil civilians – that hundreds of innocent people have been killed by the army in heavy shelling, saying soldiers are only lightly armed and are trying to rescue trapped people. In the propaganda war that has accompanied the crisis, the Tamil Tigers have also denied credible allegations that they were holding civilians hostage as human shields.

The UN spokesman Gordon Weiss said today that fighting was now expected to intensify.

"The government is saying publicly that there will be no more breaks in the fighting so that suggests that there will be another push in the next few days," he said.

The UN estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 civilians remain trapped.

The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, announced the dispatch of a humanitarian team at a news conference in Brussels yesterday. It believes there are still 50,000 trapped in the last war zone in the north – a sliver of coastal land from where more than 100,000 civilians have fled in the past week.

"So many lives have been sacrificed. There is no time to lose," Ban said. He added that the new team would monitor the situation and the UN would do "whatever we can to protect the civilian population who are caught in the war zone".

The mission will coincide with an influx to Colombo of ministers from concerned countries around the world. A British minister will arrive this weekend and senior ministers from India are on their way.

India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, called for an end to "the continued killing of innocent Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka".

"The Sri Lankan government has a responsibility to protect its own citizens and the LTTE must stop its barbaric attempt to hold civilians hostage," he said. "There is no military solution to this ongoing humanitarian crisis, and all concerned should recognise this fact."

The Sri Lankan defence secretary, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, rejected a UN appeal to allow more aid agencies into the war zone.

"It's not a sensible thing at the moment," he told the BBC. "There is a civilian rescue operation going on in the area and allowing aid agencies inside the conflict zone is not matching with ground realities."

While the government has allowed aid agencies to help those fleeing the conflict, Sri Lanka's UN ambassador said only the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Catholic charity Caritas had been permitted to enter the war zone.

The ICRC said it evacuated 530 people on Thursday and 350 the day before, including families and sick and wounded people.

On Wednesday, the UN security council, which had been accused of inaction, called on the Tamil Tigers to lay down their arms and urged the Sri Lankan government to uphold international humanitarian laws and allow international aid agencies into areas of need.

The UN and other western nations, including the US and the UK, have pressed for an immediate halt to the fighting to allow time for civilians to leave the war zone safely.

The UN's humanitarian coordinator, Neil Buhne, said tens of thousands of people were living in camps in the northern town of Vavuniya.

"I saw infants with dysentery, malnourished children and women, untended wounds, and people dressed in the ragged clothing they've been wearing for months," the Associated Press quoted him as saying.