Video footage that appears to show Sri Lankan troops committing war crimes by summarily executing captured Tamil Tiger fighters on the battlefield was not fabricated, as claimed by the Sri Lankan Government, an investigation by The Times found.
The video of the alleged battlefield executions, which was aired on Channel 4 in August, shows a naked man, bound and blindfolded, being made to kneel.
Another man, dressed in what appears to be Sri Lankan army uniform, approaches from behind and shoots him in the head at point-blank range.
“It’s like he jumped,” the executor laughs. The camera then pans to show eight similarly bound corpses.
A 10th man was also shot in the same way towards the end of the video with men in the background gloating over the killings.
It is impossible to confirm when and where the filming occurred or the identities of the men shown, noted the Times.
Channel 4 stressed in its original report that it could not verify the authenticity of the video which it received from a group called Journalists for Democracy in
The group claims the video footage was taken in January by a soldier using a mobile phone.
The United Nations said at the time that it was viewing the footage "with the utmost concern" but could also not verify the video.
The Sri Lankan government has claimed that it has “established beyond doubt” that the footage was fake. It denies that the video shows soldiers shooting unarmed, naked men.
An analysis for The Times by Grant Fredericks, an independent forensic video specialist who is also an instructor at the
He found no evidence of digital manipulation, editing or any other special effects. However, subtle details consistent with a real shooting, such as a discharge of gas from the barrel of the weapon used, were visible, the report said.
“This level of subtle detail cannot be virtually reproduced. This is clearly an original recording,” said Mr Fredericks, who was previously the head of the
There was also strong evidence to rule out the use of actors. “Even if the weapons fired blanks, the barrel is so close to the head of the ‘actors’ that the gas discharge alone leaves the weapon with such force it would likely cause serious injury or death,” Mr Fredericks told The Times.
The reactions of those executed was consistent with reality, he added. “The victims do not lunge forward . . . [they] fall backward in a very realistic reaction, unlike what is normally depicted in the movies.”
In Mr Fredericks’s opinion “the injury to the head of the second victim and the oozing liquid from that injury cannot be reproduced realistically without editing cuts, camera angle changes and special effects. No [errors] exist anywhere in any of the images that support a technical fabrication of the events depicted,” he said.
The Sri Lankan Government conducted its own investigations into the video in September and concluded that the footage was “done with a sophisticated video camera, dubbed to give the gunshot effect and transferred to a mobile phone.”
Mr Fredericks’s research showed that code embedded in the footage appeared to match with software used in Nokia mobile phones. He said: “The recording is completely consistent with a cell phone video recording and there are no signs of editing or alterations.”
The strong evidence that the footage does show real executions could reinforce international calls for an independent war crimes investigation, reported The Times — something that the Sri Lanka Government has resisted.
The Times UK report closely matches the key findings by the US Colorado-based Image and Sound Forensics (ISF) experts who performed the analysis on behalf of
Colorado ISF's report, parts of which appeared in the Sunday Leader, had previously confirmed, "[t]he video and audio of the events depicted in the Video, were continuous without any evidence of start/stops, insertions, deletions, over recordings, editing or tampering of any kind."
Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions had earlier declared the video investigations by the local 'experts' appointed by the Sri Lanka Government as "not impartial."
However, Philip Alston's assertion that UN will conduct its own investigations on the authenticity of the video has not materialized.
Meanwhile, TAG spokesperson when contacted by TamilNet said, "While we have published the summary of the findings, ISF is due to provide TAG a detailed technical report detailing the analysis carried out."
