{"id":149267,"date":"2025-04-28T13:47:23","date_gmt":"2025-04-28T19:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=149267"},"modified":"2025-04-28T06:46:02","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T13:46:02","slug":"revealed-british-mercenaries-linked-to-brutal-crackdown-on-left-wing-activists-in-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2025\/04\/28\/revealed-british-mercenaries-linked-to-brutal-crackdown-on-left-wing-activists-in-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"Revealed: British mercenaries linked to brutal crackdown on left-wing activists in Sri Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.declassifieduk.org\/author\/phil-miller\/\">PHIL MILLER<\/a><\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>18 November 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A British mercenary kept working at Sri Lanka\u2019s military headquarters in the late 1980s during a bloody crackdown on left-wing activists from the country\u2019s Sinhalese majority, new evidence obtained by Declassified UK reveals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Young people were disappeared or killed by Sri Lankan security forces during the second JVP uprising in the late 1980s (Photo: Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>New revelations come as UK Metropolitan Police launch an unprecedented war crimes investigation into allegations British mercenaries were involved in atrocities against Sri Lanka\u2019s Tamil minority in mid-1980s<\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>The new evidence was kept in a \u2018cupboard\u2019 at British High Commission in Sri Lanka for over three decades and not given to National Archives<\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Foreign Office claims to UN \u2018we do not believe they add anything of substance\u2019 to the allegations against British mercenary firm Keenie Meenie Services<\/strong><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>Crackdown on leftists from 1988-89 used the \u2018Jakarta Method\u2019 of exterminating Marxist sympathisers, killing around 60,000 people<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>British mercenaries were active in Sri Lanka for up to a year longer than previously thought, <em>Declassified<\/em> has found.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The company for which they worked, Keenie Meenie Services (KMS), kept an intelligence officer stationed at Sri Lankan military operations headquarters during the<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2000\/jul\/23\/srilanka\"> brutal suppression<\/a> of one of the country\u2019s left-wing organisations in 1988\u201389.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Around 60,000 people, mostly students, are alleged to have been killed by Sri Lanka\u2019s security forces during a crackdown on the People\u2019s Liberation Front (<em>Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna<\/em> or JVP), a controversial leftist movement drawn from the majority Sinhalese ethnic group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PHIL MILLER 18 November 2020 A British mercenary kept working at Sri Lanka\u2019s military headquarters in the late 1980s during a bloody crackdown on left-wing activists from the country\u2019s Sinhalese majority, new evidence obtained by Declassified UK reveals. Young people were disappeared or killed by Sri Lankan security forces during the second JVP uprising in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149267","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149267\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}