The Sri Lankan president has ordered the Presidential Security Division (PSD) to step down due to reports it may have been involved with murders, and has instead chosen to replace it with the Special Task Force (STF).
Economy Next reports a government official as saying "the PSD will be completely replaced by the STF", due to links to high-profile murders, including that of a rugby player in 2012.
"The process is taking place as we speak,” said the official. “It will be completed in the next 48 hours".
The unit is to however be replaced by Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force, an infamous elite unit that has also been linked to massacres of Tamils and egregious human rights abuses.
The STF is accused of conducting numerous massacres including the killing of five students in Trincomalee in 2006 and the massacre of 17 aid workers of the French NGO Action Contre La Faim (ACF) in the same year. Reports of killings stretch even further back with STF officers also accused of killing 83 Tamils in Kokkadichcholai on January 27 1987.
No member of the STF has ever been prosecuted for any of the killings.
Earlier this year a report by the International Human Rights Association Bremen stated that the unit was formed after intensive advice from British security experts. See more here.
The unit was being expanded in 2013 with the then commander stating Sri Lanka had the provision for 10,000 STF troops.
See a feature on the STF, its origins and ethos, written in 2001, below.
An elite believing in terror as their creed (25 July 2001)