The Inner City Press on Tuesday charged that the “UN has withheld real-time evidence of war crime” in Sri Lanka in 2009, in “effect protecting the government of Sri Lanka from criticism” by the international community at large.

This allegation was leveled yesterday at a discussion that was held about "War Crimes Records," primarily about the Holocaust but with Syria, for example, mentioned by Dan Plesch on the panel.

 Plesch asked, if people could collect records in London under bombing, how not in Syria today? Indeed. But consider that the UN itself WITHHELD evidence of war crimes in Sri Lanka in 2009.

Posing a question at the panel about the viability of holding a “legally substantiated investigation into events took place in 2009 with Sri Lanka refusing to give visas for UN investigators and trying to intimidate potential witnesses”, Inner City Press journalist Matthew Russell Lee said that the UN has “withheld casualty statistics it had in real-time about what it knows” about Sri Lanka’s war crime in 2009.

“After claiming of Sri Lanka that "we don't count bodies," the UN has now involuntarily admitted that the "minimum number of documented civilian casualties since 20 January 2009, as of 7 March 2009 in the conflict area of Mullaitivu Region [is] 9,924 casualties including 2,683 deaths and 7,241 injuries," in a leaked document of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs obtained by Inner City Press,” the ICP said.

 “OCHA's top official John Holmes, as well as spokespeople for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, have repeatedly denied that the UN has such casualty figures.  Now it appears that unlike in other conflicts from Darfur to Gaza, the UN withheld the Sri Lanka figures, in effect protecting the Sri Lankan government from criticism,” it also stated.