There is really very little to actually report when you cover Sri Lanka. That sounds ridiculous, but let me qualify myself: there is no real, first hand information or experience that you can lay your hands on. It’s all potentially tainted somehow.

You spend your time explaining that the other side disagrees with the other side’s claim, and that you can’t tell who’s telling the truth as you’re mostly stuck in a hotel in the capital unable to …

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… that’s one step from starvation.

The images are the only view we can get onto the camps as the Sri Lankan government jealously guards access to them. Conditions there are not expected to improve in the coming months. In mid-August, flash flooding over three days filled many parts of the camp with water, hampering its frail infrastructure.

There are fears among many aid workers that this will pale into insignificance compared to the damage they will see when the monsoon hits in about a …

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… may find distressing.

Last night I watched another video in our newsroom, this time from Sri Lanka.

It was sent to us by a group of exiled journalists. It was chillingly reminiscent of the Bosnia video. 

The casual banter and laughter of the uniformed killers was what I immediately found so callous and shocking, as they kicked in the head and then shot – point-blank – their bound, blindfolded, naked victims. 

The raw footage – one continuous shot lasting one …

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… Tigers’ final stronghold.

The deaths, they said, were the result of government shelling. The Sri Lankan president and senior government ministers have repeatedly denied causing a single civilian death in what the government had desginated a “no-fire zone.”

International aid agencies believe as many as 100,000 civilians may have been trapped inside, under a fierce bombardment.

“I think every day a thousand people were killed,” one of the very last to escape the tiny …

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Sinhalese Sri Lankans are so relieved their war is over that most appear blinded by patriotism, drunk on victory and deaf to the clamour from outside their island for investigations into possible war crimes.

The country’s pliant media speak with one voice, exhorting their loyal compatriots to celebrate this great triumph over terror.

But the only terror I saw there was in the eyes of vanquished …

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… their aid. They are Tamils desperately concerned about the fate of their families and friends in Sri Lanka.

I moved among them and met many. They are in many cases professionals. I met two sisters, consultants at London hospitals. I met engineers, teachers, and shop keepers.

But I also met a terrible sense of despair that we in Britain have neglected their plight and that of the one million displaced Tamils in Sri Lanka.

And I wondered, as MPs tried to wrestle the Speaker from his …

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… makeshift hospital there is being hit so often, it has stopped functioning.

And right now, the Sri Lankan army is pushing forwards. They say they are 1.5km away from dominating the entire coastal strip. They say thousands of civilians are fleeing, and continue to do so. They’ve released more aerial drone footage of this exodus.

You can see people are getting out now, but what’s not been clear for a long time, is where are they going?

For about two weeks, there have been very …

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… to defence secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa 45 minutes earlier about getting some better access to Sri Lanka’s 25-year war. But this time he was calling me, and seemed to have remembered something.

“Who is this? You rang me earlier? Is this Channel 4? You have been accusing my soldiers of raping civilians? Your visa is cancelled, you will be deported. You can report what you like about this country, but from your own country, not from here.”

I’m missing out my interjections, but …

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As the week comes to a close, we notice Nick Paton Walsh’s report on a camp in Sri Lanka has consistently been the most-watched video on the Channel 4 News website since its broadcast on Tuesday – a likely reflection of the large international appetite for news from the country.

The report features the first independently filmed pictures from the internment camps set up by the Sri Lankan government to house Tamils who have fled the country’s civil war. …

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