Sri Lanka Displays Killing Site of 200 Police Officers Believed Slain by Rebels

Government security forces Sunday displayed a killing site littered with the bodies of up to 200 police officers who they said were massacred by Tamil separatist guerrillas.

The government’s elite Special Task Force took journalists to a bush clearing in the Indian Ocean nation to unveil a mass grave.

Officers estimated there were 150 to 200 corpses in the clearing outside Rufus Kulam, a town about 200 miles east of Colombo, the Sri Lankan capital.

Officers said the bodies were those of men from three police stations who surrendered without a fight after months of cooperating with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam rebels under government orders.

The Hindu Tamil rebels are fighting to establish a separate state in the largely Buddhist island nation.

During fighting Saturday, 30 rebels were killed in a four-hour gun battle with Sri Lankan troops after they ambushed an army convoy and killed six soldiers, military sources said Sunday. At least 11 soldiers were injured. The rebel death toll could not be independently confirmed.

After ending 13 months of peace talks on June 11, the Liberation Tigers seized about 1,000 police officers, most of them from the majority Sinhalese community.

Tamil police officers were freed and some others escaped, but the government said 630 officers are missing and believed dead.

The army is fighting to regain control of Sri Lanka’s northeast region from the Tigers, who have been fighting for 20 years for a Tamil state.