Cops accused of torture
2004-03-26 12:55
Colombo - An Asian human rights group on Friday accused Sri Lanka's police of the "gruesome" torture of suspects in custody, saying the island's law enforcement is nearing collapse due to a lack of discipline.
The Hong Kong-based Asian Legal Resource Centre said its report that it has records of 46 people allegedly tortured by Sri Lanka's police.
The report emphasizes "the gruesome torture still being practiced in police stations across Sri Lanka," the centre said in a statement posted on its website.
A spokesperson for Sri Lankan police in Colombo said the report was yet to be seen in the Sri Lankan capital.
"But let me tell you that we always investigate a complaint," said Rienzie Perera.
Currently there are 33 cases against police officers for alleged torture.
The group cites an incident when a police officer severely assaulted a detainee with a stick, then forced another detainee, suffering from tuberculosis, to spit into the other man's mouth.
The report also mentions a 23-year-old woman from Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority, who was arrested by police on suspicion that she had connections with the separatist Tamil Tiger guerrillas, the statement said. It said she was beaten up, burned with cigarettes and gang-raped by 12 policemen.
She says that police later forced her to sign a confession saying the Tigers had assigned her to kill a government minister, according to the statement.
"These officers are obviously psychologically unbalanced, and yet they are allowed to function as criminal investigators, exercising enormous power over the people they arrest," the group said.
"To describe policing in Sri Lanka as being in crisis would be to understate the current situation; it is nearing collapse," the centre's executive director, Basil Fernando, said in the statement.
Human rights groups have long accused Sri Lankan police and military of using torture to obtain confessions during the island's two-decade civil war with Liberation Tigers of Tamileelam, who were fighting for a separate Tamil state. The conflict claimed 65 000 lives.
The Tigers and the government signed a cease-fire in February 2002. The truce has held, but a rift in the rebels' leadership threatens renewed violence.
- SAPA