By Walter Jayawardhana

Mahinda Samarasinghe , Sri LankaƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢s Minister for Disaster Management and Human Rights in a telephone interview from Colombo with this correspondent said when experts ran Channel 4 video shot of a supposed killing field in Sri Lanka at a 50 percent less speed in a laboratory one of the so called corpses raised a leg and put it down amazingly denoting the doctored nature of the video.

ƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ…-We have put through these video shots in two independent laboratory tests and two army laboratory tests and all have found the video to be blatantly doctored, colour introduced later to denote blood, voices dubbed later and the original video had been shot by a video camera rather than a phone camera as claimedƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ”š‚, he said in the interview.

He said as if the dead coming to life when the video was put through at a slower speed a supposed to be corpse raised the leg and put it down showing the video to be a highly doctored one and this kind of a video would never have been shown before in the annals of television journalism before.

Mahinda Samarasinghe said the two independent tests were done by two experts in Sydney Australia and the University of Moratuwa in Sri Lanka.

The two independent analysis and the two army analysis conclusively established that the original video , as Channel 4 announced was not taken by a phone camera as the British television channel claimed but by a larger video camera.

The gun shot sounds heard in the video, according to the tests, were not gunshots fired in the so called killing field locality shown but gun shots fired in a distant place , Samarasinghe further claimed.

He said the experts have analysed the human voices heard in the video (Some Sinhalese words spoken supposedly by the Sri Lanka Army) and found them to be voices dubbed later into the video.

He said in the video a dead body is laying near a puddle of water and experts had claimed the blood shown appearing in the water had been introduced to the video by adding red since the blood did not spread in the water.

He said the Sri Lanka Army with their uniforms never use white T shirts as their underwear. The T shirts are always olive green to avoid those becoming easy targets. But in the video one of the supposed army man is wearing a white T shirt proving this cannot be the Sri Lanka Army, he said.

He said the Sri Lankan Attorney General is studying the available legal remedies for Sri Lanka against Channel 4 news and Al jazirra and BBC who repeated broadcasting the videos.

But before taking any legal remedies it is the duty of the British channel to retract it and give an assurance that such damaging fake videos would not be broadcast in the future, Samarasinghe said.

The video had drawn the attention , as he had been told , by the United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, Samarasinghe said. It had harmed Sri LankaƒÆ’‚¢ƒ¢-¡‚¬ƒ¢-¾‚¢s image immensely, he further claimed.