Desperation is rife among the 280,000 Tamil civilians imprisoned in internment camps in northern Sri Lanka with countless civilians unable to locate or contact relatives missing or separated during the bloody chaos that ensued during the final weeks of the Sri Lankan military onslaught.
Many clutched a razor wire fence, desperately searching the crowds on the other side for a familiar face as they tried to discover whether their loved ones were still alive and at liberty, or in another of the camps, a British newspaper reporter describing the plight of the civilians in one of the camps wrote.
Some are still hoping to find relatives amid the rows of tents that provide a temporary home.
But others say relatives were separated out by the military, suspected of being Tamil Tigers.
One refugee said that thousands of fleeing civilians were separated from their families when they reached the army check-point, where they were pushed onto buses and taken to different hospitals and camps.
Navamani, 43, from Vattuvagal in Mullaitivu district, said she had lost her three children, aged 16, 18 and 21, in the chaos.
The task of tracking down lost relatives is complicated by the fact that inmates are not allowed to leave the camp because of the risk, the Government says, that LTTE fighters inside may escape.
The tactics of herding civilians into internment camps indefinitely has been widely criticised.
Sri Lanka has offered up contradictory explanations.
Officials and military officers at the camps variously claimed that the civilians were there for their own safety, for the safety of the rest of the population and because most "have been involved in some sort of activity for the LTTE".
Some officials said that screening of the civilians was taking place inside the camps.
However, other officials admitted that no such screening was taking place, raising questions over the purpose of the continued detentions.
“No formal screening at the camps, no,” Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara, the military spokesman, said.
International journalists who managed to speak to some of the Tamils held in the Menik Farm internment camp reported of heartbreaking stories of mothers searching for their children, elders unable to contact relatives and children, including infants lost without parents.
Bhuvaneswari, whose son and two daughters are missing, held photographs through the wire.
"Nine members of my family are missing, please help me find them," she asked Britain’s The Telegraph reporter.
"They've been missing since the mass exodus on April 20th. When the army entered the safe zone and cut the area in two, we were separated. We don't know if they've been killed by the army or what."
Thangarajah, 59, a carpenter, told telegraph that his family had moved 14 times since January as the Tigers retreated into the "no-fire zone" on the north-east coast.
"My son and daughter-in-law, my brother-in-law, my cousin, all died in shelling attacks. We built bunkers and kept moving from one place to another. Shells were falling everywhere. Four people died in my family while I was there. We just left their bodies in the bunker and filled them in," he added.
33-year-old Yogisuran’s, three children – Thuyamthini, Kuwanthini and Thusiyanthini - have not seen their mother for weeks, ever since a shell exploded next to the bunker where they had taken cover, ripping a hole in her stomach, reported the Guardian newspaper.
Medics rushed 29-year-old Sandi to a makeshift hospital, where doctors operated to save her life. All that Sandi's family know is that she was later evacuated on a ship by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
They have not seen her since, and trapped with tens of thousands of others in the Menik Farm camp they are powerless to do anything about it.
Another camp refugee, Threekanden, 27, is similarly distraught at the disappearance of a loved one. He produces a picture of himself and his wife, Pokonai, on their wedding day. They were split up last month, he said, when the army advanced on the last Tamil Tiger redoubt in northern Sri Lanka.
"Now I cannot find my wife or our daughter. The girl is only four and my wife was nine months pregnant. I don't know where they are. We need help to find them." He told the Guardian.
Navaratnam Rasapalen, 31, said he arrived at Menik Farm on 18 May. He lost contact with his wife, Jagadah, and three children, aged seven, five and three, on 18 April when the army advanced.
"The army cut off the civilians in a box and I could not find them," he told the Guardian.
"I just want to find them. I don't know what to do. Please help me to find them."
Several others in the same part of the camp had similar stories reported the Guardian and added that evidence of the brutality of civil war was everywhere.
One young woman, who gave her name as Banji, was carrying her 18-month-old daughter, Umarani. The child's head was wrapped in a tattered bandage and her right hand was bound up. She had been hit by shrapnel from a shell, her mother said, which had gashed her head and broken some of her fingers.
"The problem is that the government thinks we are all LTTE. There is nothing we can do," said Sivalingam, 63, a medical officer from Kilinochchi, who had recently arrived at the camp.
At Vavuniya's Zone Two, a few miles down the road, a mother and daughter who had been separated for five months had finally found one another, but were not allowed to embrace, according to the Telegraph.
Kandaswamy, 73, was weeping on one side of the razor-wire, and reaching out to her daughter, Laxmi, 45, who has been in detention since fleeing the final battle earlier this month. She needed all the comfort she could get – four of her five children had been killed in shelling – reported the Telegraph.
An army spokesman said that up to 6,000 families had been reunited to date, and that they were working to bring separated families together.
But he added: "At the moment we don't know how many families are separated or how many disappeared."
