Sri Lanka 'war crimes' video: woman's body identified

Wednesday 08 December 2010

Jonathan Miller Foreign Affairs Correspondent

Channel 4 News can name a woman journalist as one of the victims in the Sri Lanka execution video along with damning new details of the date and location where the video was filmed.

Warning: this page contains disturbing images.
After extensive investigations Channel 4 News can reveal that one of the victims was a high profile member of the Tamil Tigers press and communications wing.
Shoba - whose nom de guerre was Isaipriya - was aged 27 when she died, and was identified by a friend speaking on condition of anonymity.
The distressing execution video footage, screened by Channel 4 News last week and originating in Sri Lanka, shows a number of incidents of soldiers in uniform shooting in the head people who appear to be unarmed – described as "cold-blooded killing" by an international expert. The video also shows the bodies of other men and women lying on the ground.
Leading war crimes lawyer Julian Knowles, from Matrix Chambers, told Channel 4 News the video was "astonishing evidence" of a type he had only seen "a handful of times" showing the mass killing of civilians or unarmed combatants, a serious war crime.

Read more from war crimes lawyer Julian Knowles on the 'astonishing evidence' of the Sri Lanka video

The video was shot towards the end of Sri Lanka's 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009, between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) group, known as the Tamil Tigers.
Channel 4 News can now reveal that one of the victims was a high profile member of the Tamil Tigers – but her role was as a journalist rather than a direct fighter as a result of a heart condition.
Identity of the victim
One of the women shown in the video has been identified by a close colleague and friend, speaking to Channel 4 News, as the Tamil journalist, Isaipriya (pictured above).
Isaipriya was part of the Tamil Tigers, her former colleague told us. She identified that Isaipriya's body appears in the "war crimes" video, partially covered by a sheet, with cuts to the face.

"Isaipriya never carried a gun and her physical condition did not permit her to go to the battlefield." Friend and colleague of Isaipriya

She said: "Isaipriya joined the LTTE. Because of her physical condition, she was deployed to the media unit. She was in the production team. She did some acting. She was a TV presenter. She was a dancer.
"She never carried a gun and her physical condition did not permit her to go to the battlefield. She always had either a camera, a pen or a notepad."

Evidence of who may be responsible
While Isaipriya's body is seen in a video which includes footage of executions, it is unclear how she died. The identities of the soldiers - who look directly at the camera at times in the video - are also unclear from the video, although the fact that they speak Sinhalese suggests they are government troops rather than Tamil fighters.
However, it has emerged that the date of her death and the soldiers who killed her are both listed on the Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence website, fixing the date of the video more accurately and indicating which troops were active at that time.