Sri Lanka’s elite police force, the Special Task Force, was formed after intensive advice from British security experts, according to a new report by the International Human Rights Association Bremen.

The report Exporting police death squads - From Armagh to Trincomalee, supplementary to an earlier document detailing Britain’s involvement in Sri Lanka’s war against Tamils, says British security officials, in the early 1980s, advised senior Sri Lankan policemen on the UK’s counter-terrorism experience in Northern Ireland, even arranging for them to visit Belfast.

British mercenaries are also thought to have trained the STF, which is implicated in several cases of human rights abuses, including abductions and killings, at its inception.

"The new evidence reveals that Sri Lanka's Special Task Force was created only after intensive advice from British diplomats about UK counter-insurgency policy in Northern Ireland, where a similar police commando unit had recently shot dead six people. This raises important questions about UK State complicity in designing Sri Lanka's death squad,” the report’s author Phil Miller told the Tamil Guardian.

India's Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Kiren Rijju said the government will continue to give assistance to refugees from Sri Lanka who have been seeking refuge in Sri Lanka for over twenty years.

"Central Government is ready to extend whatever possible necessary help you want, but at the same time we need inputs from the state government, so it has to be a combined effort of the state and Centre," Rijiju told the refugees, accoring to ANI.