Sri Lanka’s military said Friday troops had shot dead three men being sought for attempting to revive the LTTE, including ‘Gopi’ described as the leader.

A cross-party trip by British MPs to Sri Lanka was called off at the last minute Thursday night after Labour members of the delegation pulled out due to party pressure, reported Channel 4 News.

The all-expenses-paid trip, funded by former cricketer Muttiah Muralitharan’s charity Foundation of Goodness, would have seen MPs, and some of their partners, travel to the island for a ‘fact-finding’ visit, which would have included a meeting with senior Sri Lankan ministers and officials and President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who stands accused of command responsibility for war crimes.

The Labour MPs pulled out after intervention from a senior frontbencher who “strongly objected” to the visit, Channel 4 said.

That prompted the Conservative MPs to also abandon the trip.

Reacting to revelations that a trip by British MPs to Sri Lanka was cancelled at the eleventh hour on Thursday, the British Tamil Forum (BTF) urged UK politicians to be wary of being co-opted by the Sri Lankan government into whitewashing its rights abuses.

“It is important that the UK politicians realise the serious nature of the crimes that Sri Lanka is trying to cover up by using them in its propaganda,” BTF representative S.A.N Rajkumar told Tamil Guardian.

“I am not surprised that the trip has been called off – the MPs have had a narrow escape as their visit would have been a propaganda coup for the government” at a time of intense international attention on Sri Lanka’s rights abuses, he said.

Sri Lankan police have arrested 65 Tamils over the past month on accusations of attempting to revive the LTTE, a spokesman told reporters in Colombo on Thursday.

See reports by AFP and Daily Mirror.

"The UK sees accountability for alleged war crimes, respect for human rights, and a political settlement as essential elements of post-conflict reconciliation."

A Tamil asylum seeker in Sydney set himself on fire and is in a critical condition, after the Australian government decided to deport him back to Sri Lanka, reported The Sydney Morning Herald.

The man, Janarthan, who suffered 98% burns to his body, is unlikely to survive, said
Trevor Grant from the Tamil Refugee Council.

A suicide note left by Janarthan said he would rather die in Australia than in Sri Lanka, Grant added.

Despite Sri Lanka’s achievement of Millennium Development Goal one, the halving of extreme poverty, poverty remains in the Northeast of Sri Lanka, which has a large Tamil population, Britain's parliament heard on Wednesday.

Responding to a question by Labour MP Sarah Champion, who asked about the Department for International Development’s assessment on the levels of poverty amongst Tamils in Sri Lanka, Minister of State for the department, Alan Duncan, said: