Word: varatharajah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Disaster-management and human-rights minister Mahinda Samarasinghe revealed that the three doctors - T. Varatharajah, T. Sathyamurthi and V. Shanmugarajah - had been detained by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and are being investigated for suspicion of working with the Tigers. The three doctors remained in the shrinking combat zone during heavy battles in May and crossed over to government-held areas only three days before the government announced the death of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, signifying the effective end of the Tigers' long insurgency. (See pictures inside Sri Lanka's rebel-held territory...
...During the last weeks of the war, the government consistently charged that the three doctors were providing inflated numbers and wrong information about civilian casualties by government fire within a narrow no-fire zone. On May 12, Varatharajah told the Associated Press that 49 patients were killed and 50 others were injured when shells hit the only functioning medical facility within the zone...
...according to some reports. Amnesty International said the three had last been seen on the morning of May 15 near Omanthai, where the screening of civilians and others escaping the combat zone was taking place, about 50 miles (80 km) south of the fighting. One of the doctors, Varatharajah, was injured during the latter stages of the fighting...
...government, however, has maintained that the information relayed by the doctors was inherently unreliable. After the May 12 incident, the health ministry said Varatharajah had not communicated with the ministry since late last 2008. "We have always maintained that any voice from the [former] no-fire zone cannot be an independent voice. When somebody was talking from the small area under the Tigers, it was not an independent voice. There was a pistol pointed at the head when they are talking to BCC, CNN or al-Jazeera," Samarasinghe said, with his index finger firmly pointed at his temple...
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