IF THEY ARE SCHOOL GIRLS HOW COME THEY WEAR MILITARY UNIFORMS?

By Walter Jayawardhana

Although the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam controlled news website alleged Sri Lanka Air Force Kfir jets bombed a children’s home compound in Mullaithivu and killed 61 school girls many have questioned how come some photographs the website published openly show the so called school girls wearing dark military uniforms.

The photograph we have copied from the website and publish below shows 15 corpses of most probably teenaged women the website claimed died of the bombing. Five of them, seen at a distance have been completely covered with white sheets of cloth or paper. But looking at the ten corpses seen near, one could see very well, at the time of taking this picture, they were in fact clad in dark LTTE military uniforms.

But hurried attempts are evident from the photograph how some people tried to conceal the uniforms by using several methods. One method was to wrap the uniform with a white sheet but that failed to cover the full uniform. In other corpses one could clearly see the pants of the dark uniforms have been either cut or folded exposing the legs of the girls. It is customary for the Tamil people to cover the legs of young women. But here they had to show the legs to indicate they are dead bodies but the legs also showed the folded or cut pants of the uniforms.

The closest corpse is clearly wearing a uniform. The second and the third corpses from the nearest are also clad in uniforms. The fourth dead body is no doubt clad in a uniform. But later some one had tried to put on a frock over the uniform. The pants of the military uniforms on the nearest three corpses have been folded exposing the legs of the girls. The fifth and sixth corpses from the nearest have got other colored clothes wrapped around the corpses with difficulty. Seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth corpses are also wearing dark uniforms but other clothes have been wrapped around them.
By looking at this photograph perhaps one could ask the question: Do Mullaithivu school girls wear military uniforms? Like in any other parts of the country don’t they wear white school uniforms? As claimed why was the LTTE interested in giving them training in first aid? We demand a full explanation from the editor of the Tamil Net.

This item of propaganda was published by the Tamil Net as their fifth lead under the heading 61 school girls killed, 129 wounded in Air Strike. It was datelined August 14, 2006, 4.15 GMT.
The so called objective Western news agencies like Reuter and AP have picked up their stories from this website of deception. The SLMM head Ulf Henricsson has also reportedly repeated the story.