Colombo: A Sri Lankan presidential commission will be appointed to investigate a mass grave where more than 150 skulls and bones, most likely of Marxist rebels killed decades ago, were found last year, a government spokesman said on Monday. President Mahinda Rajapaksa had decided to appoint the commission to investigate into the mass grave found at a state-run hospital in the central region of the country, said Lakshman Hulugalle, head of the government's Media Centre for National Security.
He told reporters the commission's probe will be in addition to an ongoing police investigation, adding names of the members of the commission will be announced soon. Workers found the remains while doing construction last December at the hospital in Matale, about 105 kilometres, northeast of the capital, Colombo. The skeletons were found buried in neat rows, five or six stacked on top of one another, totaling 154 bodies.
Last month, a judge declared the mass grave a crime scene, and said the skulls and bones recovered date back 25 years, strengthening suspicions that they belonged to suspected Marxist rebels killed at the time. Magistrate Chathurika de Silva told a court in Matale that tests carried out by archeological and judicial medical officials showed the remains dated to between 1987 and 1990. During that period, thousands of men and women suspected of having ties to the rebels disappeared after being arrested by security forces.
When the bodies were found, there were initial claims that they belonged to those killed
11:28 PM, Apr 08, 2013
Redgrave praised the rowing basin at Rio de Janeiro which is to be used in the Games three years from now. ...
01:26 PM, Mar 10, 2013
Pakistani police arrested a man in the garrison city of Rawalpindi for trying to bury his dog near a graveyard, according to a media report on Sunday. The man, who was not identified, was arrested under a provision of the Pakistan Penal Code related to trespassing burial places even though he had not entered the cemetery. ...
01:04 PM, Feb 19, 2013
Authorities on Thursday re-imposed curfew in Kashmir to foil any plans of separatist groups to stage a march to Eidgah graveyard in memory of Parliament attack convict Mohammad Afzal Guru. Police vehicles fitted with public address systems announced the imposition of curfew and asked people not to venture out of their homes. ...
10:59 PM, Feb 14, 2013
Government will consider any request by the family of Afzal Guru to visit his grave inside the Tihar jail here where he was buried after his hanging on Saturday, Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde said on Monday. "If they want to go (to the grave), it can be considered," Shinde said. ...
04:42 AM, Feb 12, 2013
Former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on Sunday accused the West Bengal government of squandering money on self promotion instead of creating jobs. ...
02:39 AM, Jan 14, 2013
Former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on Sunday accused the West Bengal government of squandering money on self promotion instead of creating jobs. "The constant refrain is all work has been done. Sometimes it is being said 90 per cent of the work is complete. We ruled West Bengal for 34 years. But we could never think of saying such things," he told a CPI-M rally at Dum Dum. ...
09:26 PM, Jan 13, 2013
A special Air India aircraft left at 8 am on Saturday to bring back the body of the Delhi graveheart, who breathed her last at 2.15 am (India time) at a Singapore hospital. ...
11:12 AM, Dec 29, 2012
Matale (Sri Lanka): A mass grave unearthed in Sri Lanka has stirred memories of the country's bloody insurgencies and sparked calls for an official inquiry in the island nation that has drawn global scrutiny for its chequered human rights record. At a building site near a hospital in Matale, a central town 142 km (88 miles) from the capital, Colombo, excavators have found the skeletons, or parts of the skeletons,...
03:51 PM, Dec 19, 2012
Hyderabad: "Mar ke bhi chain na paya to kidhar jayenge? (If there is no peace in death, then where will I go?" This Urdu couplet from Ibrahim Zauq aptly sums up the problem of the dead in Hyderabad. In this booming metropolis, where thousands struggle for a place to live in, even death offers no solution. Rapid urbanisation, burgeoning population, escalating land prices and shrinking graveyards due to encroachments have...
12:58 PM, May 15, 2012
London: The owner of a popular Indian eatery joint in Kent has bought an unusual vehicle to ferry his curries around the world - an Iraqi fighter jet. Rob Abdul, who owns Cafe Taj in Gravesend, Kent has started taking flying lessons. Abdul came up with the idea with a pilot friend, has earmarked about 35,000 pounds for buying and restoring the plane, which Abdul says is needed because his...
07:54 PM, Jan 27, 2012
London: Vanessa Redgrave was hailed at a Hollywood film academy tribute Sunday, praised as an actress and an activist by A-list friends including Ralph Fiennes, Meryl Streep and James Earl Jones. More than 30 years after she shocked the Oscars ceremony with a fiercely political acceptance speech, Redgrave was the subject of an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences retrospective - its first to an actor in Europe. "I...
12:15 PM, Nov 14, 2011
Mumbai: UTV has entered into a deal with Warner Bros. International Television Distribution to bring popular Hollywood movies dubbed in Hindi and Telugu on the small screen. Through the exclusive long-term telecast rights deal, the company's primary action movie channels UTV Action and UTV Action Telugu - will have access to 60 and 50 titles a year respectively from the Warner Bros. library, Sameer Ganapathy, Business Head, UTV Action and...
12:22 PM, Oct 24, 2011
Tel Aviv-Jaffa: Dozens of gravestones were desecrated at adjacent Muslim and Christian cemeteries overlooking the sea at Jaffa and a fire-bomb was thrown at a nearby synagogue, on Saturday, Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. At least five tombs were smashed and some 20 others sprayed with Hebrew graffiti, including "Death to Arabs" and "Price Tag," a slogan used by militant Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and...
02:10 PM, Oct 09, 2011
New Delhi: In what is being seen as an attempt by China to justify its involvement in Pakistan occupied Kashmir (POK), it's state run news agency Xinhua has picked up the issue of unmarked graves that's rocked Kashmir. The news agency came out with a report that paints a gruesome picture of a burial ground filled with unmarked graves in Poonch. Quoting local sources, the report says bodies - some...
07:12 AM, Oct 03, 2011
Srinagar: The Jammu and Kashmir Assembly on Tuesday witnessed uproarious scenes after Opposition PDP sought discussion on the issue of nameless graves. The members of the Opposition, PDP, walked towards the Speaker's podium while demanding that an adjournment motion be brought on the issue, following which they staged a walkout. Later, speaking on the issue, state Chief Minister Omar Abdullah said that people needed answers and that the government had...
11:30 AM, Sep 27, 2011
Tripoli: Libya's interim authorities said on Sunday they had found a mass grave in the capital containing the bodies of more than 1,270 people killed by Muammar Gaddafi's security forces in a 1996 massacre at Tripoli's Abu Salim prison. The uprising that toppled Gaddafi last month was ignited by protests linked to the Abu Salim massacre. In February, families of inmates killed at the south Tripoli prison in 1996 demonstrated...
10:41 PM, Sep 25, 2011
Galaa: In a grove of pine trees near this mountain village, residents have dug up the remains of 35 bound and blindfolded men who they say were shot at close range by Muammar Gaddafi's military. Dozens of miles away, a search team has exhumed the bodies of 18 detainees who died on a hot summer day while locked in a shipping container by Gaddafi guards. As Libyans cope with the...
08:33 AM, Sep 10, 2011
A human rights group has found over 2000 unnamed bodies in graveyards spread across three districts in Kashmir. ...
10:31 PM, Aug 30, 2011
Srinagar: A human rights group in Kashmir has found over 2000 unnamed bodies in graveyards spread across three districts, bringing hope for the families of scores of people who have gone missing in Kashmir in the past two decades. DNA tests will now be carried out to gives these families closure. Tahira and Tariq Ahmad have been married for 10 years and have three children. But Ahmad's sudden disappearance in...
11:16 AM, Aug 29, 2011
