The Sri Lankan government confirmed it has launched an investigation into its High Commissioner to the United Kingdom Rohitha Bogollagama, after allegations of financial misconduct in London.
Sri Lankan foreign minister Vijitha Herath confirmed that an investigation would take place, but claimed that allegations a car was purchased for Bogollagama by the government were not true.
Earlier this month, unconfirmed reports by Sri Lanka’s Daily Mirror claimed that British police also visited the official residence of Bogollagama, with claims that a domestic worker there was being harassed.
Bogollagama, who trained as a lawyer, was Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2007 till 2010 and spent much of his term denying increasingly substantiated reports that war crimes were committed by the Sri Lankan military in a systematic manner.
In January 2010, Bogollagama flatly rejected the UN human rights investigator, Philip Alston's calls for an international inquiry into war crimes, after a video emerged of Sri Lankan troops killing blindfolded Tamils. The government described the video as a fake, whilst Bogollama accused Alston of deliberately timing his comments to interfere with the then upcoming presidential elections.
A month after the conflict ended, Bogollama was vocal in rejecting any reports of the military firing into the No-Fire Zone, claiming the military "never returned" LTTE fire in the area. "Within the no-fire zone we never returned fire because we would never have taken that degree of chance for inflicting harm on civilians," Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama told The Times in June 2009, after the paper reported over 20,000 Tamils civilians died in the NFZ.
