Tamil: I Was Tortured And Raped
Updated: 7:24am UK, Thursday 14 November 2013
By Lisa Holland, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Navaneethan Subramaniam is not allowed out of the London mental health unit where he is being treated unless he is accompanied.
He arrived in August after smuggling himself illegally into Britain via Europe in the back of a lorry.
Navaneethan's lawyer says he is under constant supervision because there are fears he may try to take his own life after suffering weeks of torture, allegedly at the hands of the Sri Lankan army.
This is the first time Navaneethan has left the hospital grounds. He wants to tell his story and has been allowed to leave for a few hours by doctors to meet us at a nearby cafe.
Navaneethan speaks virtually no English and talks to us through a Tamil solicitor.
During the Sri Lankan civil war he says he was a driver for the separatist group the Tamil Tigers - but he insists he is no longer an activist.
After the end of the civil war he says he went to France but was deported back to Sri Lanka, where he said he was abducted one day on his way home from work.
The 33-year-old said he was picked up and tortured in May of this year - four years on from the supposed end of the civil war.
His story is typical of the claims of abuses which human rights groups say are continuing in Sri Lanka.
He told me: "They came in front of me, stopped me and said, 'I want to speak to you, come', then grabbed me from behind my head, grabbed my collar and pushed me into the van."
Navaneethan says he was taken to an army camp where he was held for 23 days.
He said: "I was questioned. They said, 'You have been the driver of the vehicles belonging to the group (Tamil Tigers). You smuggled arms and hid them. Where are the bunkers with weapons?'."
He says he was slapped and punched, beaten with a rifle butt, given electric shocks, made to feel like he was drowning and repeatedly sexually abused.
"I was beaten but before that I was given electric shocks. It was like two squares held onto my waist. After that I was assaulted with a rifle butt. My ear was pulled with pliers and I was stabbed with an army knife.
"The sexual thing ... three army personnel came one night. I was kept the whole night. One after the other they came to me and they did it."
"I was mostly beaten with plastic pipes, long wooden poles and wires. They put a plastic bag over my head and put water inside. I couldn't breathe at all.
"At that time I felt instead of going through all this torture I would rather die - my torture was that severe.
"Like what happened to me, the torture is on a massive scale and the outside world has no idea about these things."
Navaneethan - who is applying for permission to stay in Britain - returned to the hospital after spending a few hours with us.
Sky News raised his case with Dr Chris Nonis, Sri Lanka's High Commissioner to the UK.
He said: "People who came over here as economic refugees living off the British taxpayers' money who now should be deported naturally do not want to be deported, and they will come up with all sorts of conjecture of 'torture', because they have a compelling reason why they want to stay.
"There will always be a group of people who funded terrorism, who made terrorism a business, who will perpetuate a proxy propaganda war. All these are usually unauthenticated, unverified and uncorroborated.
"We have a formal process of investigation. It is a domestic process and that will continue because no one condones any form of torture.
"But there are lots of spurious allegations and it is fundamentally important for a country post-conflict that we separate fact from fiction."
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