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Foreign Office shredding history 'smacks of a lack of transparency'

THE Foreign Office is claiming that files it destroyed about Britain’s role in Sri Lanka’s civil war may have been “ephemeral.”

Minister for Asia Mark Field made the excuse after Labour’s Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi questioned him in Parliament over recent revelations in the Morning Star.

Last month, we exposed how diplomats had shredded hundreds of files from the start of a Tamil uprising in Sri Lanka, dating back to the 1970s and ’80s.

Experts say the historic papers would have shed more light on Whitehall’s support for Sri Lanka’s right-wing president, who was a major recipient of British arms and advice.

However, Mr Field has insisted: “The Public Records Act does not require departments to preserve files if they are of no long-term historical value.

“For instance, the FCO may destroy a file if it only contains administrative or ephemeral content or because it contains information which is already in the public domain.”

His response has failed to satisfy Mr Dhesi, who told the Star: “This smacks of a lack of transparency and accountability.

“For our UK government to destroy files, especially from such a sensitive period, gives out all the wrong signals.

“I’m sure that we are now advanced enough as a society technologically that we can digitise these files before destroying.

“People can then ascertain for themselves whether or not something is ‘ephemeral’.”

A handful of Royal Air Force (RAF) files that escaped the shredder show how Britain’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) visited Sri Lanka in 1980, weeks after the Iranian embassy siege.

An SAS team coached a Sri Lankan army commando unit, although the details are sparse and Foreign Office files would have contained more details.

The training trip is also mentioned in the memoirs of SAS soldier Rusty Firmin, who claims that one Sri Lankan trainee died after a local soldier accidentally shot him in the head.

This major accident is absent from any of the surviving British files.

Concern about the destruction of documents on Sri Lanka comes after the government was criticised for destroying paperwork about an SAS visit to India.

In 2014, it emerged that the Ministry of Defence had destroyed a document detailing an SAS trip to Amritsar in 1984.

An SAS officer secretly advised Indian forces how to evict Sikh dissidents from the Golden Temple, which resulted in a bloodbath.

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