Over 20,000 trapped Tamil civilians were killed as the Sri Lankan Army launched its final assault to end the country's nearly three decades old civil war with the LTTE guerrillas, a media report said on Friday.

An investigation by The Times newspaper has revealed that the figure of over 20,000 civilians killed in the final stages of the civil war, most as a result of government shelling, is three times the official figure.

Blaming the civilian casualties on the LTTE rebels, authorities in Colombo have insisted that the army halted the use of heavy weapons on April 27 and observed the no-fire zone where 100,000 Tamil men, women and children were sheltering.

However, the report claimed that aerial photographs, official documents, witness accounts and expert testimony present a clear evidence of an atrocity that comes close to matching Srebrenica, Darfur and other massacres of civilians.

It said the army – without the scrutiny of world media and aid organisations which were kept well away from the war zone – launched a fierce barrage that began at the end of April and lasted about three weeks.

Confidential United Nations documents obtained by the British daily record nearly 7,000 civilian deaths in the no-fire zone up to the end of April.

According to sources with the world body, the casualties then surged, with an average of 1,000 civilians killed each day until May 19, the day after Tamil Tigers supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed in fierce fighting, the figure concurs with the estimate made to The Times by Father Amalraj, a Roman Catholic priest who escaped from the no-fire zone on May 16 and is now among the 200,000 other survivors in Manik Farm refugee camp, which is among the largest camp sites hosting internally displaced persons.

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