241 Pizza

As April turned to May, and the artillery exacted a heavier toll, bodies went unburied.

"We didn’t have the chance to bury our kith and kin," Father Amalraj said. "We left them on the road. The whole crowd is a witness to that," he said, gesturing around to the parishioners gathered in his tent in Manik Farm. "All around, the dead and injured."

Some people were buried. From the air neat rows of freshly dug graves revealed themselves but it was unclear if they contained the bodies of fighters or civilians. Others have been dug but not filled. A crater next to them appears stained red. Elsewhere, on the beach near to civilian shelters, similarly shaped mounds appear in the sand. The Times has passed the photographs to independent experts for analysis.

Some of those who emerged to try and escape were felled by the Tigers’ gunfire. "The LTTE shot people trying to escape," Father Amalraj said. "It was not at random. They shot in the air and then they shot at the people and killed them."

He named a Tiger commander who gave the orders to shoot at fleeing civilians as Tiramulai. The last person he saw shot before he fled was one of his parishioners, killed while trying to flee the zone on the afternoon of May 16, two days before the Tigers' leader Vellupilai Prabhakaran was killed.

But by then, the shelling was so intense that the remaining civilians decided that they had no option but to try to escape, even at the risk of being shot themselves.

"I said I am going with my people because we are going to die tonight here," he recalled. Most of the remaining civilians believed the same thing. Fifty thousand of them began to make their way towards the causeway out of the zone, rebuilt by government troops on the other side.

"We started coming out and they [the Tigers] fired at us. But they didn’t shoot me, they couldn’t stop me. We knew it was useless to stay. We put our fate with God."

What happened inside the so-called no fire zone will not be the subject of any investigation in Sri Lanka, although the Prime Minister has called for a commission to probe the arming and activities of the Tigers.

At a joint press conference with Mr Ban, Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama brushed away questions about the chances of an investigation into war crimes by both sides. Was he entirely confident then that no Sri Lankan forces had committed such crimes? "Absolutely," he replied.

On Tuesday the UN Human Rights Council will meet to decide whether it believes there is cause for an international probe. Britain and the US are among the countries calling for one.

Father Amalraj, meanwhile, searches the tents of Zone Four in the Tamil "welfare camp" at Manik Farm, looking for his lost sheep. Of 4,000 original parishioners, he has no idea how many survived. Which side, in the end, does he blame for the terror and loss of those last few months in the no-fire zone? "As A Tamil, I can’t blame the LTTE for fighting for the Tamil people," he says. "Look at this camp and you can see. They are planning to oppress the Tamil community under the pretext of terrorism. All our efforts have been brought to zero."

Times Recommends

• African migrants desperate for a better life
• Karzai, the Anglophile who alienated the West
• They killed my family, but I rise again