Paramilitary groups with links to the Sri Lankan Army are abducting Tamil children as young as 12 from state-run internment camps set up to hold 300,000 people displaced by the Government’s war with the Tamil Tigers, a campaign group says.

The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers said that children under 18 were being snatched from the camps, which are struggling to cope with refugees from the war zone on the northeastern coast.

Minors were also being taken from the northern town of Vavuniya by paramilitary groups with the tacit support of the Government, the coalition, which includes Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said.

It suspects that anti- Tiger paramilitary groups such as the Eelam People’s Democratic Party and the People’s Liberation Organisation of Tamil Eelam are being allowed into the camps by the Government.

Verification of the claims is all but impossible as the Government is denying media access to the camps.

The reported abductions have added to fears over the fate of the refugees after the Government barred the International Committee of the Red Cross and the United Nations from the camps.

Fourteen international aid agencies, including Oxfam and Save the Children, warned yesterday that thousands of lives were at risk because aid workers and their vehicles were not being given enough access to the camps.

David White, deputy country director of Oxfam in Sri Lanka, said: “The camps stretch over 1,000 acres and take nearly an hour to walk across. Without vehicles we can’t do our work properly and that’s putting lives at risk.

“We’re asking the Sri Lankan Government to adhere to the guiding principles agreed by them with the humanitarian community, and to let us do our job properly.”

Sri Lanka has agreed to resettle most of the refugees within six months, according to two Indian envoys who met President Rajapaksa yesterday.

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