The British Deputy High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Laura Davies has detailed how she was monitored and people she met questioned, during her visit to Amparai, Batticaloa and Trincomalee, in the North-East of the island.

In a blog post "Looking over my shoulder", published on Tuesday, Davies said several people were “too scared” to meet her.

“[It] gradually became impossible to ignore the fact that I was being watched,” she wrote on the Foreign Office blog page.

“Worse, it was clear that the people I was meeting were having follow-up visits or phone calls, asking what I had done and said. Some of this was almost comic: I met with one individual who had invited a large press corps to capture the moment of our meeting.”

“Towards the end of our discussions, he got a phone call asking him to report whether he knew who the foreigner was in town, despite the fact that his office had already released well-captioned pictures on social media. But other instances were clearly frightening to individuals and their families. I was saddened but not surprised that several people were too scared to meet me.”

Davies said that some newspapers had said she was in the area to collect testimony for the OHCHR Investigation on Sri Lanka, which she denied.

“Of course the British Government is interested in the progress of that investigation, and it’s a matter of great regret to us that the Government of Sri Lanka is not cooperating more fully with a report which is intended to look at allegations against all sides involved in the conflict. But we have absolute confidence in the investigation team’s ability to source and validate its own testimony: I’m not about to try to do their job for them.”

Read her full post here.