Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said that the Cabinet approval given to create an office on missing persons was part of the domestic accountability process.
He also dismissed claims that 40,000 civilians were killed during the war.
Samarasinghe said that a former Colombo based UN official had made the claims about the 40,000 death toll and this was quoted as the source in a UN panel report.
Skills Development and Vocational Training Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe on Friday (June 3) said in a news brief that the UN, UNHCR, any other global agency or country had never claimed that 40,000 were killed during the final phase of the humanitarian operation in 2009.
‘The claim that 40,000 were killed in the war at the tail end of the fighting was a fabrication by former UN spokesman in Sri Lanka Gordon Weiss who later joined an NGO and wrote a book on Sri Lanka’s civil war.
