\n London police said Monday they have launched an investigation into alleged war crimes by British mercenaries who trained a security force accused of brutalising Tamil people during Sri Lanka's civil war.\n<\/p>\n
\n The war crimes unit of the Metropolitan Police said it was acting on a referral received in March \"concerning war crimes alleged to have been committed by British mercenaries in Sri Lanka during the 1980s\".\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Following receipt of the referral, the War Crimes Team began a scoping exercise into the matter and have subsequently launched an investigation,\" it said, declining to comment further while the probe is ongoing.\n<\/p>\n
\n The investigation concerns Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), a now-defunct private security company that trained an elite unit of the Sri Lankan police called the Special Task Force in the 1980s to fight Tamil separatists, according to the BBC.\n<\/p>\n
\n The STF has been accused of summary executions of alleged Tamil Tiger rebels and killings of Tamil civilians.\n<\/p>\n
\n The probe follows the publication in January of a book by investigative journalist Phil Miller called \"Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes\".\n<\/p>\n
\n \"A lot of Tamil people became refugees in the 1980s, that's when KMS were there,\" Miller told the BBC.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"People remember being attacked by helicopter gunships so I think people are quite shocked to learn that in many of those cases helicopters were flown by British mercenaries,\" he said.\n<\/p>\n
\n KMS was founded in the 1970s by former officers of Britain's elite Special Air Service, including David Walker.\n<\/p>\n
\n It ceased trading in the 1990s and Walker, 78, is now listed as one of the directors of another London-based company, Saladin Security.\n<\/p>\n
\n The BBC quoted a representative of Walker as saying: \"The allegations that David Walker or staff of KMS Limited were complicit in war crimes in Sri Lanka in the mid-1980s is categorically denied.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n The police unit \"has not yet asked for assistance from Saladin or Mr Walker, but they will be happy to cooperate if asked\", the representative added.\n<\/p>\n
\n Sri Lanka's Tamil separatist war ended in 2009. More than 100,000 people lost their lives, according to United Nations estimates.\n<\/p>\n
\n The UN accused Sri Lankan forces of killing at least 40,000 Tamil civilians in its military campaign, an allegation denied by successive governments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
London police said Monday they have launched an investigation into alleged war crimes by British mercenaries who trained a security force accused of brutalising Tamil people during Sri Lanka's civil war. The war crimes unit of the Metropolitan Police said it was acting on a referral received in March \"concerning war crimes alleged to have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-46131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n