The body of a prominent Sri Lankan human rights activist missing since February last year has been found, the United Nations said Friday.

Pattani Razeek, managing trustee of non-governmental organisation the Community Trust Fund, was exhumed by police on Thursday after a tip-off from two suspects arrested in relation to the case, the UN said.

See AFP’s report here.

"The Tamil people’s demand is that they exercise full powers of self-rule within their homeland consisting of a merged North and East. Once again, the Tamil people have declared that they will not relinquish their political aspirations.

"The Tamil people have – by ensuring the victory of the TNA – accepted and supported the recommendations of the UN [Panel’s report], which state that the government’s war crimes and human rights abuses require an impartial international investigation.

Below are extracts from a frontline Sri Lankan soldier’s eye witness account of what happened in the final days of the war in May 2009 (see Channel 4's report here):

"When I look at it as an outsider I think they're simply brutal beasts. Their hearts are like that of animals, with no sense of humanity.”

A Sri Lanka Army officer has given Channel 4 his account of how, following orders from Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the commander of the 58 Division, Brigadier Shavendra Silva (now Major General) gathered his officers in the closing days of the war and ordered them to take no prisone

Tamil youths in London, Paris and Sydney marked the anniversary of ‘Black July’ with activities to raise public awareness of the mass killings of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

British Tamils held a candle light vigil Saturday evening opposite the Prime Minister’s official residence, 10 Downing Street, to remember victims of Sri Lanka’s 1983 ‘Black July’ anti-Tamil pogrom.

Based on a speech at the  vigil in London on July 23, 2011 to remember the victims of Black July.

Every year, for 28 years, the Tamil people and our friends across the world have come together in July to remember a crucial turning point in our history. Black July was the largest and most significant of Sri Lanka’s pogroms, more horrific and unrestrained in its violence than the Nazis’ Kristallnacht.

“The resounding victory consolidates the Tamil National Alliance's status as an authentic representative of ethnic Tamils in negotiations with Rajapaksa's ethnic majority Sinhalese-controlled government in sharing political power and postwar rehabilitation. The party had appealed to voters to give it a mandate to demand self-rule in the Tamil-majority areas.”