July 16, Colombo: The former spokesman for the United Nations in Colombo has said that the Sri Lankan government is falsely claiming the Tamil asylum seekers as Tiger terrorists because of fears that they might become witnesses in a war crimes tribunal if they are granted asylum in Australia, an Australian news service reported.

A Radio Australia News report said today that the former UN spokesman Gordon Weiss has dismissed a Sri Lankan security analyst's claims that half of all Tamil asylum seekers had links to the Tamil Tigers, and that the Tamil Tigers had links to Al Qaeda.

Weiss has questioned why the Sri Lankan government claims the asylum seekers are a danger to the security of Australia, that they have links with international terrorism and they are taking advantage of Australia's immigration system.

"The only conceivable reason can be that the Sri Lankans are trying to prevent people who have witnessed what happened in the north of the country during the war [from receiving asylum in Australia]," he has said.

In an interview with Australia's ABC news in February, Weiss, who resigned from the UN after 14 years of service and returned to his native Australia, said as many as 40,000 civilians could have been killed during the final stages of the Sri Lankan civil war last year.

The Sri Lankan government strongly rejected his allegations and said he is spreading false information about the last stages of the war.

The UN said the claims by Weiss were his personal views and not the UN's.

A recent UN High Commissioner for Refugees report said the security situation has greatly improved in Sri Lanka and the asylum seekers "are no longer in need of international protection under broader refugee criteria or complementary forms of protection solely on the basis of risk or indiscriminate harm.".

The Sri Lankan government has resettled most of the 280,000 displaced Tamil civilians in the North and has launched an accelerated development program in the North to return normalcy to in the region.

The government says some 32,000 displaced are still living in the welfare camps and they will be resettled as soon as their home villages are de-mined.

The government has released about 4,000 of the 11,000 Tiger cadres arrested after the end of the war in May 2009. The remaining cadres are being rehabilitated at special rehabilitation centers.

According to the Radio Australia News report since the start of 2009, a total of 1,129 Sri Lankan asylum seekers have arrived in Australia, with about 30 per cent being granted asylum, 7 per cent being refused and sent back, and the rest of the cases still pending.