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Almost 6,500 civilians killed in Sri Lanka, UN reports

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Saturday, April 25, 2009

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Close to 6,500 civilians have been killed and many thousands more wounded in the past three months during heavy fighting in Sri Lanka, according to a report by the United Nations.

Earlier this year, the army launched a crackdown on the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (Tamil Tigers) to oust them from their territory in the northeastern part of Sri Lanka, which the rebels have occupied for several years. The rebels have now been forced back to a small coastal strip, where about fifty thousand people have been trapped after the area was evacuated of 100,000 people.

Thangamuttu Sathyamurthi, a government health official in the war zone, reported that people were dying of starvation, and that there was a large deficit of medicine and food.

According to the medical relief group Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders), many of the people who had fled the conflict zone had gunshot and blast wounds.

The government has accused the Tamil Tiger rebels of using civilians as human shields, a claim that the rebels deny. The rebels have accused the Sri Lankan army of randomly shelling civilian areas.

The U.N. says that the rate of civilian deaths in the country has risen sharply. On average, 33 civilians were killed per day at the end of January. The number has now increased to an average 116 per day.


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  This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.
Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

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