The Sri Lankan military opened an investigation on Sunday after photos were posted on social media showing soldiers forcing minority Muslim men to kneel in the streets to punish them for breaking the rules of containment.
Armed soldiers ordered Muslim civilians to raise their hands in the air while kneeling on a street in the town of Eravur, 300 kilometers east of the capital Colombo.
Townspeople described the acts as degrading and humiliating, and army officials acknowledged that soldiers were prohibited from inflicting such punishments.
The victims were on their way to two restaurants to buy food.
"An initial military police investigation has already started after some photos showing the alleged harassment in the Eravur region went viral," the military said.
"The army will adopt the strictest disciplinary measures"
She said the officer in charge had been dismissed from his post and the soldiers involved in the case had been ordered to leave town. "The army will adopt the strictest disciplinary measures against offending army personnel," she said, showing a rare willingness to investigate her own. Sri Lanka is once again confined for a month to contain a third wave of coronavirus infections. The death toll from Covid-19 has more than quadrupled to 2,531 since the start of this wave in mid-April.
The army, which is accused of war crimes in connection with the thirty-seven-year conflict - until May 2009 - between government forces and Tamil separatists (mainly Hindu ethnicity), has been deployed to assist the police and the health authorities to enforce the rules intended to fight against the virus.
Successive Sri Lankan governments have consistently denied that troops killed around 40,000 civilians during the final stages of this separatist conflict, which in total claimed more than 100,000 lives between 1972 and 2009.
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