PHIL MILLER

18 November 2020

A British mercenary kept working at Sri Lanka’s military headquarters in the late 1980s during a bloody crackdown on left-wing activists from the country’s Sinhalese majority, new evidence obtained by Declassified UK reveals.

Young people were disappeared or killed by Sri Lankan security forces during the second JVP uprising in the late 1980s (Photo: Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka)

• New revelations come as UK Metropolitan Police launch an unprecedented war crimes investigation into allegations British mercenaries were involved in atrocities against Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority in mid-1980s
• The new evidence was kept in a ‘cupboard’ at British High Commission in Sri Lanka for over three decades and not given to National Archives
• Foreign Office claims to UN ‘we do not believe they add anything of substance’ to the allegations against British mercenary firm Keenie Meenie Services
• Crackdown on leftists from 1988-89 used the ‘Jakarta Method’ of exterminating Marxist sympathisers, killing around 60,000 people

British mercenaries were active in Sri Lanka for up to a year longer than previously thought, Declassified has found.

The company for which they worked, Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), kept an intelligence officer stationed at Sri Lankan military operations headquarters during the brutal suppression of one of the country’s left-wing organisations in 1988–89.

Around 60,000 people, mostly students, are alleged to have been killed by Sri Lanka’s security forces during a crackdown on the People’s Liberation Front (Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna or JVP), a controversial leftist movement drawn from the majority Sinhalese ethnic group.