"The Sri Lankan government cannot get away with hiding what it did to civilians during the war," Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for HRW, told Inter Press Service. "This report helps to show that. It compiles all of the information out there about what happened and it turns out there's a lot of sources ... If their goal was to win the war and not allow the world to see what was happening to civilian caught in the crossfire, then they failed."
The State Department also discusses reports of the killing of captives or combatants seeking to surrender by the Sri Lankan government and disappearances of Tamil civilians by government forces or government-supported paramilitaries.