It is a chilling piece of footage that represents yet another blow for the beleaguered Sri Lankan government in its attempts to head off a critical

at the

in Geneva this week. The short clip dates from the final hours of the bloody 26-year civil war between the government and the secessionist rebels of the

, the

.

A 12-year-old boy lies on the ground, stripped to the waist and has five neat bullet holes in his chest. His name is Balachandran Prabakaran and he is the son of the LTTE leader,

. Beside him lie the bodies of five men, believed to be his bodyguards. There are strips of cloth on the ground indicating that they were tied and blindfolded before they were shot — further evidence suggesting that the government forces had a systematic policy of executing many surrendering or captured LTTE fighters and leading figures, even if they were children.

The footage — dating from 18 May 2009 and which seems to have been shot as a grotesque “trophy video” by Sri Lankan forces — will be broadcast for the first time on Wednesday night in a Channel 4 film, ‘Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields: War Crimes Unpunished’ — a sequel to the controversial investigation broadcast last year which accused both the LTTE and the government of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Last year, a special panel appointed by the UN Secretary-General

suggested that as many as 40,000 civilians died in the last few weeks of the war. The new evidence of the death of Balachandran will increase pressure on the Sri Lankan government. In addition to the footage of the boy’s dead body lying beside his slaughtered bodyguards, Channel 4 has obtained a series of high-resolution stills of the scene. These have been analysed by a respected forensic pathologist, Derrick Pounder, to assess the cause of death. It is possible, he suggests, that the boy may have been made to watch the execution of his bound and blindfolded guards before the gun was turned on him.

Pounder believes he has identified the first of the shots to be fired at the boy: “There is a speckling from propellant tattooing, indicating that the distance of the muzzle of the weapon to this boy’s chest was two to three feet or less. He could have reached out with his hand and touched the gun that killed him.”

The High Commission of Sri Lanka rejected what it calls “malicious allegations” in the film. It said it had chosen to focus on: “A number of highly spurious and uncorroborated allegations and seek — entirely falsely — to implicate members of the Lankan government and senior military figures.”

(The Independent)