Four people, including an advisor to President Mahinda Rajapakse, have been killed in as rival factions of his ruling UPFA party clashed in a Colombo suburb, during local government elections.

Presidential advisor on trade unions, Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra was allegedly shot dead by MP Duminda Silva's faction at Kotikawatta, northern Colombo.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper on Saturday, Randeep Ramesh, the paper's former South Asian correspondent for over six years, highlighted Liam Fox's dubious relationship with Sri Lanka's Sinhalese rulers.

Extracts reproduced below, see full article here.

"Fox had first arrived in 1995, landing at the palm-fringed airport as a junior Foreign Office minister. A little more than a year later, such was his influence with the Sinhalese elite, who essentially run the country, that he had persuaded the rival parties not to attempt to outflank each other while negotiating peace or ceasefires with the brutal rebel separatists of the LTTE."

"During a chance meeting in Singapore in 2007, Fox – by then shadow secretary of state for defence – fell in with one of Rajapaksa's lieutenants, the foreign minister Rohitha Bogollagama. He was back in the game."

"[2009] Concerned that the Sri Lankan army was indiscriminately bombing and killing Tamil civilians, the west ratcheted up pressure on the regime. Fox, a neocon in outlook, took a rather different view. And his new friends turned to him for help."

"At the beginning of 2009, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, attempted to send a special envoy to the island and the US offered to evacuate the 100,000 civilians trapped in the last 20 square miles of territory under LTTE control."

"The foreign minister told Fox, who happened to be on a visit to Colombo at the time, that the government was declining "offers of assistance" until it had "cleared the north from the clutches of the terrorists".

Extracts from report in The Economist:

Amnesty International, International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, along with five MEP’s have organised the screening of Channel 4’s documentary “Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields” at the EU Parliament next Wednesday (12.10.11).

A letter was sent out by the organisations inviting delegates to the screening.

The letter further states:

Sri Lanka is developing a system to track and monitor foreign nationals as they enter and travel around the country, after a new online travel approval system is fully operational, LBO reports.

Sri Lanka is starting at electronic travel authorization program from January 01, and is to scrap free visa-on-arrival to 78 countries.

The House of Lords on Wednesday, saw Britain reaffirm its commitment for a thorough investigation into allegations of war crimes in Sri Lanka, as Lords debated the holding of the 2013 CHOGM in Sri Lanka.

During question time Lord Kennedy of Southwark submitted a question to the House and said the British Government should state "it would be wrong for Sri Lanka to host the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in 2013".

Lord Wallace of Saltaire responded,

In an effort to relieve some of the international pressure being exerted upon Sri Lanka regarding allegations of war crimes, the country's human rights envoy, Mahinda Samarasinghe, proclaimed a five-year action plan for human rights protection.

The plan is to be presented at the UN Human Rights Council session in March next year.