Remains of girl child among 65 skeletons unearthed at Sri Lanka's Chemmani mass grave

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

"The findings of the excavation at the Chemmani mass grave were reported to the Jaffna Magistrate's Court on July 15 by Raj Somadeva, a forensic archaeologist overseeing the exhumation," Jeganathan Tathparan, a lawyer, told PTI on Thursday.

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

Tathparan said the child's remains were found alongside school bags and toys.

Somadeva informed the court that the child was a girl in the age range of 4-5 years, he said.

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 drew international attention in 1998 when a Sri Lankan soldier testified about 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 the dozens of sites unearthed throughout the country. Thousands of people died and disappeared during the 26-year-long civil war, which ended in 2009.

The main Tamil political party, Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), in a letter to President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, underlined that the Chemmani mass grave is a clear evidence of war crimes and "a genocidal campaign against Tamils".

The excavation work, which was halted on July 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 the island nation claims that nearly 170,000 people were killed in the final stages of the civil war, while the United Nations estimates put the figure at 40,000.

The LTTE was seeking a separate homeland for Tamils.