From the air, the battle zone reveals itself one clue at a time — the scorched patches of earth, the blasted palm trees, the burnt-out skeletal houses.

Then the helicopter banks sharp right over the green lagoon and a blaze of white sand appears — to the gasps of the first outsiders to glimpse the beach where the Tamil Tigers made their last stand.

Sri Lanka’s no-fire zone is a scene of such utter devastation it mocks its very name. It is a glimpse of hell unleashed in paradise. A glistening white beach packed with home-made bunkers where civilians huddled to protect themselves from the shells that the government denies launching in the final weeks of the offensive. The craters in the white sand; the charcoal coloured scorch marks and bombed-out dwellings; the abandoned bus, its forlorn white flag still flying, and the human detritus tell a very different story.

Peering down from above, one struggles to imagine the terror of being here in those last days of battle when 100,000 civilians were trapped in this tiny spit of sand between the guns of the Tamil Tigers and the cannons of the Sri Lankan army. No journalists, aid workers or independent observers have had access to the zone until this weekend when a small group of journalists accompanied the United Nations Secretary General on aa flight over the zone.

Father Amalraj does not have to imagine; he was here in the bunkers, among his flock, until the day before the Tigers announced their surrender. He described the terror of living under the constant shelling as the last battle approached.

"The people were targets for both side," the Roman Catholic priest told The Times inside the barbed wire fences of Manik Farm, one of the camps to which Tamil civilians were sent after they escaped from the no-fire zone.

"There was heavy shelling from the army side. The LTTE shot people. The army were trying to capture us. The people were caught in between in the last moment for the LTTE and the crucial point in the battle for the army. I cannot say which side was crueller."

He and his parishioners fled their village, Poonakary, just below the Jaffna peninsula when government forces overran it last November. They were on the move for months, fleeing ahead of the fighting over and over again until they reached the narrow strip of land on the eastern side of the Nanthikadal Lagoon, north of Mullativu in February, soon after it was designated a no-fire zone" by the Government.

It was anything but. Father Amalraj described how the people in the zone had cowered in improvised bunkers built on the beach for weeks on end to escape the shelling. "The shelling was just like raining," he said. "Within this two square kilometres, there were more than 100,000 people, packed in and shells raining down."

Many were killed. The UN believes that between 8,000 and 10,000 civilians have died in the conflict since the beginning of this year.

Father Amalraj, albeit anecdotally, believes the final tally is far higher. "We cannot say exactly how many died, but it was many, I think about 20,000."

The Sri Lankan government denies inflicting a single civilian death, blaming the shelling on the Tamil Tigers, despite the accounts of witnesses like Father Amalraj who testify that the shells came from the direction of the government front line.

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