Colombo, Feb 19: The International Red Cross today announced reopening investigations into 11,000 people listed as missing in Sri Lanka while the country's warring parties sought to establish the fate of the victims. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) delegation here said it had begun fresh inquiries from the relatives of the 11,000 people in their files.
The list dates back to 1990 and the files had been in limbo after ICRC exhausted all possible ways of tracing them.
But all that changed when the government and the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) during their peace talks in Thailand last month asked the ICRC to help set up a mechanism to verify the fate of missing people.
"We hope the independent verification system will be agreed on and it will be off the ground in the next few weeks, if not days," the head of the ICRC delegation office here, Marco Brudemann, said.
He said the focus of their field activities was to contact the families and update the information they have in their old files.
The ICRC has been operating in Sri Lanka since 1989. Bureau Report