SRI LANKA: A Sri Lankan court sentenced five people to death, including two police officers, for their role in a massacre at a detention camp housing suspected Tamil Tiger rebels and former child soldiers, reports said.
Less than half of the 40 inmates of the Bindunuwewa camp 140 miles east of Colombo survived after a machete-wielding mob rampaged through the rehabilitation camp in October 2000.
Tamil protests over the massacre turned violent, causing Sri Lanka's worst intercommunal violence since 1983, when an anti-Tamil riot plunged the country into the full-scale war that has cost 64,000 lives and displaced one million.
The sentences for the massacre, which set off the island's worst ethnic riots in 18 years, were automatically commuted to life imprisonment as Sri Lanka has had a moratorium on the death penalty since 1976.
Local media said the 94-page judgment released late on Tuesday condemned police officers for complicity in the attack.
"The police officers who were in uniform and armed could have at least prevented or controlled the situation.
"By not doing so they had aided and abetted the crime," the local Daily Mirror reported.
The island is enjoying the longest lull in fighting since 1983 due to a Norwegian-brokered truce signed in February last year.
The Tigers and government have held several rounds of peace talks.
But the rebels, who have been fighting for a separate state for minority Tamils in the north and east, said justice was not served by convicting five in a case they allege involved a mob of between 800 and 3,000 villagers.
"Sri Lanka's Sinhala-dominated law-and-order apparatus assures Sinhalese, be they security forces personnel or civilians, of impunity when it comes to atrocities against Tamils," the pro-rebel Tamil Guardian said in an editorial.