Sri Lanka News Updates with Discussions

SINGAPORE, Saturday- A Singapore man was jailed for three years after he faked his own death in a civil war shoot-out in Sri Lanka in 1987 to escape his creditors and claim S$331,341 ($243,600) in insurance money, a newspaper reported on Saturday.

The Straits Times said that Gandaruban Subramaniam fled Singapore more than 20 years ago -- harassed by creditors and illegal money lenders since the failure of his car rental business -- and moved to London to work as a street sweeper.

The 60-year old eventually settled in Sri Lanka where he managed to obtain a death certificate stating he had been killed in a shootout between Government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels, allowing his family to claim on his insurance policies.

But he returned to Singapore a number of times using a fake Sri Lankan passport and also remarried his wife in Sri Lanka in 1994 and fathered a son, their fourth child, two years later. The couple has since divorced.

Gandaruban's scam was discovered by a Singapore lawyer and he was arrested at Singapore's Changi Airport last October. His former wife and brother both served jail time for their part in the fraud, but have since completed their sentences. -Reuters.

Government and its officials could be held liable for abuse under international criminal law and acting through paramilitary groups would not absolve them of the responsibility to uphold the law, Philip Alston the UN Special Rapporteur on extra judicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a report released two weeks back.

The report is to be taken up for discussion in Geneva on June 2.

'The government should recognise that, regardless of the formal relationship between its security forces and these paramilitary groups, it cannot avoid international legal responsibility for their actions. Military commanders and other government officials should also recognise that acting through a paramilitary group will not suffice to prevent them from having individual criminal responsibility for extra judicial executions and other abuses,' the report said.

'The government has completely failed to comply with the recommendation made by the Special Rapporteur that it renounce all collaboration with the Karuna Group. Instead, the government has intensified its collaboration with a range of paramilitary groups,' the report added.

He said that the government relied heavily on paramilitary groups in the east and to a lesser extent in Jaffna. 'The government has relied extensively on paramilitary groups to maintain control in the east and, to a lesser extent, in Jaffna. There is evidence that these groups conduct operations with the government forces and are responsible for extrajudicial executions,' the Alston report also said.

The report was a follow-up to actions recommended by Alston after his visit to Sri Lanka between November 28 and December 6 2005.

In his latest report Alston said that the government and the Tigers both had failed to act on his recommendations and in certain areas the situation had deteriorated.

'By way of overview, the recommendations made in the Special Rapporteur's report on Sri Lanka have not been implemented. Recommendations directed to the Government have been all but completely disregarded, and in most areas there has been significant backward movement. The same is true of recommendations directed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).'

He said that war could be conducted without compromising basic rights and called on the UN Human Rights Council to take action on the Sri Lankan crisis.

'This failure to adopt measures necessary to ensure respect for human rights cannot be attributed simply to the outbreak of large-scale hostilities. Wars may be fought while respecting the provisions of international human rights and humanitarian law. The Government and the LTTE have, however, chosen to conduct this conflict in a manner that treats human rights and human rights defenders as obstacles to effective tactics. It is imperative that the Human Rights Council address this crisis,' the report adds

'According to information received by the Special Rapporteur, extra judicial executions have increased dramatically since he visited Sri Lanka at the end of 2005. This increase in extra judicial executions has been accompanied by efforts to dismantle existing mechanisms to ensure the accountability of security forces for human rights violations. It is tempting to ascribe these trends to the failure of the ceasefire and the outbreak of hostilities. But this is, at best, only a partial explanation,' he said.