Papers on early LTTE war destroyed in UK

While the FCO said any destruction decision would have been taken based on the country’s records policy, experts believe the loss of the files means there is no record of an important period of history. Britain’s MI5 and the Secret Air Service (SAS) had reportedly advised Sri Lanka’s security forces during the LTTE crisis between 1978 and 1980. “Two of the documents they destroyed were called ‘Sri Lanka/India relations’ from 1979 and 1980,” said journalist and researcher Phil Miller, who discovered the files were missing as part of a freedom of information request.

The documents are expected to have had references to India’s relations with the island nation, including the work of the Indian Peace-keeping Force (IPKF). “Removing or destroying historical records from public custody at the National Archives hurts all of us and is an illegal act,” said Vairamuttu Varadakumar, founder of the Tamil Information Centre, registered as an independent community-based non-profit organisation in 1981. “It appears that the Foreign Office’s action is designed to cover up the involvement of the SAS and MI5 in the training of Sri Lankan security forces that might be potentially embarrassing to Her Majesty’s government,” he said.

Varadakumar also claimed that Indian authorities had seized documents that belonged to the Tamil Information Centre back in 1987. The centre fears that the destruction of FCO files adds to the loss of information, which dates back to the burning of the Jaffna Library by the Sri Lankan army in 1981, which housed palm-leaf manuscripts and ancient documents and the destruction of the Jaffna Museum

in 1989.