Charity seeks wide probe of S.Lanka staff massacre

COLOMBO (Reuters) - A French charity accused the Sri Lankan government Saturday of "lacking the will to establish the truth" about the massacre of 17 aid workers in 2006 and called for an international inquiry.

Seventeen mostly Tamil staff members of the charity, Action Contre la Faim (ACF), were shot dead in the ACF compound on August 4 2006 in the northeastern town of Muttur, near where fighting was taking place between the government and Tamil Tiger rebels.

The head of a presidential probe into rights abuses, including that massacre, said in a report last week that his work was hampered by the lack of witness protection and the abrupt winding-up of his investigation.

"Today, nearly 3 years after the crime, one has to recognise that these procedures have failed, and that the Sri Lankan government obviously lacks the will to establish the truth," the French charity said in an emailed statement on the report.

"In light of this, Action contre la Faim (ACF) reiterates its call, notably to the European Union, to constitute an international inquiry into this massacre."

The government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) blamed each other for what was then the deadliest attack on aid workers since the bombing of the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad in 2003.

Nordic peace monitors, whom the government accused of a pro-rebel bias, blamed the attack on security forces.

The presidential inquiry was inconclusive about who killed the aid workers.

Foreign observers to the panel quit last year, saying it did not meet international standards and had been interfered with politically. The government denied that.

It was the latest of many Sri Lankan investigations of rights abuses that were incomplete or inconclusive.

Rights watchdogs have reported hundreds of abductions, disappearances and killings, blamed on both the government and the LTTE, throughout the course of Sri Lanka's 25-year civil war, which ended in May.

The country has a long history of failing to prosecute rights abuses, particularly when members of the security forces are involved, going back to the early 1970s when the government violently suppressed a Marxist insurrection.

(Editing by Tim Pearce)