The chair of the Sri Lankan president's commission on missing persons, Justice Maxwell Paranagama, rejected the UN Panel of Experts' estimated death toll of 40,000 Tamil civilians at the end of the armed conflict in 2009.
In an interview to the New Indian Express, Mr Paranagama stated it was an "overestimation" by the UN, and said that 7000 would be more accurate.
“The Department of Statistics which had done a house to house survey in the conflict zone, and the reports sent out by the various foreign embassies suggest a death toll of 7,700 or thereabouts. Our commission could not arrive at any precise figure, but we think 40,000 was certainly an overestimation,” he said.
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Following on from the UN Panel of Experts report, the report of an Internal Review Panel on UN Action in Sri Lanka, by the UN official Charles Petrie, acknowledged that up to 70,000 Tamil civilians could have been killed during the final stages.
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