New Delhi: Some new photographs, released by a British channel, Channel 4, of Balachandran Prabakaran, the 12-year-old son of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabakaran, are certain to increase pressure on the international community to change its stand on war crimes by the government in Sri Lanka.
The photographs, released from part of the new evidence in the forthcoming feature documentary “No War Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka,” directed by Callum Macrae, tell a chilling story: The child is captured and is being held in a sandbag bunker, apparently guarded by a Sri Lankan Army soldier.
In the first photograph, the boy sits looking distressed, like a child who has been lost in a supermarket. He has been given a biscuit or some kind of snack. In the second photograph, he is looking anxiously up, as though hoping to see someone he recognises.
In less than two hours as it seems, he is taken, executed in cold blood — and then photographed again which shows he has been shot five times in the chest.
The documentary, a culmination of three years of research, will be shown for the first time next month in Geneva, to coincide with the U.N. Human Rights Council meeting.
The new photographs are particularly important evidentially, because they prove that Balachandran was not killed in crossfire, or in a battle. His death was deliberate and calculated.
The pictures fill in chilling details on the circumstances of his murder — and leave the Sri Lankan government with yet more questions to answer about just how systematic the executions at the end of the war appear to have been.
Last year, Channel 4 had revealed video footage and stills which showed Balachandran’s body shortly after his execution.
The newly released pictures are expected to raise some difficult questions for Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, the Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa.