By Andrew Buncombe, Asia correspondent | The Independent/UK, June 6, 2009
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Civilians injured during the conflict were treated at a makeshift hospital inside the conflict zone
enlargeThree doctors who struggled to help tens of thousands of civilians wounded in Sri Lanka’s war zone could be held for up to a year before being charged with harming the country, the government has revealed.
Sri Lanka’s Human Rights Minister, Mahinda Samarasinghe, said the doctors were being detained on “reasonable suspicion of collaboration with the LTTE [Tamil separatists]“. He said the men had to be presented before a court on a monthly basis, but that investigations could take more than a year.
In the final bloody months of the war, the three government-appointed medics – Thurairaja Varatharajah, Thangamuttu Sathyamurthi and V Shanmugarajah – worked with the most basic medical facilities to run a makeshift clinic inside the conflict zone.
Without many of the drugs they required, or sufficient staff numbers, the doctors struggled to manage while their clinic came under regular bombardment, reportedly from both the LTTE rebels and government forces.
Yet, to the fury of the government, the doctors were also one of the few sources of independent information about the civilian casualties of a conflict that was all but hidden from view.
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