In an attempt to win back Tamil hearts,
Sri Lankan military said it would return unspecified quantities of gold
jewellery recovered from a battle site dating to the crushing of separatist
Tamil Tiger rebels more than five years ago.
In a statement, the military said it had
identified 2,377 "legitimate claimants" and 25 of them were handed
back their gold ornaments by President Mahinda Rajapakse, who visited the
island's Northern Province at the weekend.
The military asked residents in the
island's battle-scarred region to lodge claims with the military and said
pawning receipts issued by the Tamil Tigers would also be accepted as proof of
ownership.
At the height of their power, the Tigers
operated a banking system where they accepted jewellery as security and granted
loans to civilians. The military says they found the gold abandoned in the
conflict area.
Where owners could not be found, the
valuables would be handed over to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, the military
said.
It did not say how much of jewellery was
in military custody, but the government had said soon after the end of the war
that some 110 kilos of jewellery had been recovered from the battle zone by one
unit of the military alone.
Tamil political parties have pressed for
the return of jewellery as well as other valuables of some 300,000 Tamil
civilians who were driven out of their homes in the final stages of the war.
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