LTTE "Orphanage" is a Terrorist Training Camp

About 60 young LTTE cadres died while many were injured when the Sri Lanka Air Force conducted air strikes on a previously identified LTTE training base in Mullaitivu, on August 14, 2006. The Media Centre for National Security (MCNS) said that the LTTE has continuously denied reports by the UN agencies such as UNHCR and UNICEF of inhuman child conscripts.
The Nordic truce monitors only saw the bodies of 19 young men and women, and they did not rule out the possibility they had been receiving civilian defence training. UNICEF said they did not have access to the dead.

The LTTE has accused security forces of bombing an orphanage called Chencholai, killing 61 young girls and wounding 155.

Government spokesmen Keheliya Rambukwella and Brigadier Athula Jayawardene say that the "orphanage" was in fact a training and transit camp for the LTTE's militant cadres. According to Sri Lanka military spokesman Brigadier Jayawardene, the Head of the LTTE's Peace Secretariat S. Puleedevan has said that the LTTE was training 500 cadres in this camp. Showing a video of the air raid, the Brigadier pointed out that with LTTE cadres in uniform fleeing the scene and an ambulance evacuating casualties, it did not look like an orphanage or any civilian structure, for that matter. It had the typical appearance of a military camp, with outer and inner bunds and barricades. It was in the midst of a jungle with no other human settlements around. "We have been observing this camp since 2004 and we know all about it," added Defense Spokesman Rambukwella. He also said that, in the case of the LTTE, gender or age limit is immaterial when it comes to training of militants as they are armed to kill the government forces (who they consider as the enemy).

UNICEF has for long being saying that the LTTE recruits underage children as militants and the Sri Lanka government has consistently lobbied for international pressure to force the LTTE to stop recruiting child-soldiers.

Over three hundred Sri Lankan expatriates in the New York area gathered outside the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan, New York on August 13, 2006, to demand that UNICEF take action to bring the leaders of the LTTE before the International Criminal Court (ICC) to face charges of war crimes against children.