Foreign Secretary Dr Palitha Kohona called in Mr Amin Awad, the acting UN Resident Coordinator in Sri Lanka to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs today (11 June 2008), to express the Government’s serious concerns on the statement made by Sir John Holmes, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs on 29 May 2008 on the recent wave of bomb attacks by the LTTE targeting innocent civilians using public transport in Sri Lanka.

It was pointed out that neither the statement of Sir John nor the reported remarks of Mr Neil Buhne, the UN Resident Coordinator in Sri Lanka had identified the perpetrator of the series of the massacres. The killing of civilians was condemned only in general terms, which conveyed to the uninformed that the Government of Sri Lanka was somehow responsible for such attacks.