Two Sri Lanka Red Cross volunteers were found murdered today, police said, two days after they were abducted from the capital amid renewed civil war between the state and Tamil Tiger rebels.
The two men were waiting for a train back to Batticaloa on Friday from Colombo, when men in plain clothes who identified themselves as police took them away in a van, Sri Lanka Red Cross officials said.
The bodies were found dumped in the gem-mining district of Ratnapura, southeast of Colombo today.
Police denied any involvement in the incident, which came a day after president Mahinda Rajapaksa said most complaints about abductions were false.
"On Friday evening, they were about to take a train back to Batticaloa with four others when some people ... claiming to be police checked the identity cards of the six people and they took two of them saying that they wanted to do further checking," said Nevil Nanayakkara, director general of the Sri Lanka Red Cross.
"I sent a team to Ratnapura to check what has happened and they confirmed these are the two volunteer workers. They had been shot in the head."
Acting police spokesman N.K. Illangakoon denied the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the police had been involved or arrested the volunteers.
"The CID did not take them into custody," he said. "So far we have no clue about the people who kidnapped them."
Rights groups have reported hundreds of abductions and disappearances in recent months after the military and separatist Tigers resumed a two-decade civil war in which nearly 70,000 people have been killed since 1983.
The international community has voiced repeated concerns about alleged rights abuses by elements of the Sri Lankan military and by the Tigers.
Nordic truce monitors suspect elements of the military were behind the execution-style murder of 17 local staff of aid agency Action Contre la Faim in the island's east last year, the worst attack against humanitarian workers in memory.