Slain Tiger chief Velupillai Prabhakaran’s 12-year-old son Balachandran is shown stripped to the waist and dead with five bullet holes in his chest in yet another UK’s Channel 4 bombshell.
Reporting on this latest video, the Independent of UK on Sunday said the boy was shot from close range and there were also bodies of five men, perhaps his bodyguards — with shreds of clothing lying on the ground to suggest they were blindfolded and shot dead. The paper quoted a respected forensic pathologist Professor Derrick Pounder saying it was “possible that the boy was made to watch the execution of his bound and blindfolded guards before the gun was turned on him.”
The professor believed he had identified the first of the shots fired at the boy. “There is a speckling from propellant tattooing, indicating that the distance of the muzzle of the weapon to this boy’s chest was two to three feet or less. He could have reached out with his hand and touched the gun that killed him,” the Independent quoted Prof Pounder saying.
In another Channel 4 video frame, two international UN workers leading the last UN food convoy got trapped in a No Fire Zone. With the help of other civilians, they dug bunkers for protection from the incoming shellfire and one of them, an Australian called Peter Mackay, even conveyed the location through precise GPS coordinates, to the government. But there was massive shelling the next couple of days.
Global Tamil Forum (GTF) spokesperson Suren Surendiran said in London that the latest Channel 4 expose “is further evidence to prove that the government, including President Rajapaksa and his brothers and the highest ranking military officials, are complicit in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.” He hoped that India “will do the right thing by supporting the US resolution at UNHCR.” The Lankan high commission in London has dubbed the Channel 4 content as “highly spurious and uncorroborated allegations” and said the film had “chosen to ignore the many positive post-conflict developments now taking place.