In a rare public plea, the International Committee of the Red Cross sought access to the no-fire zone and internment camps in the region. "We haven’t been able to access the areas where most of these people would have fled from since the ending of the most recent fighting," Florian Westphal, the Red Cross spokesman, told a briefing in Geneva.

However, Sri Lanka has denied the allegation of the death of 20,000 people, which was is three times the official figure. "These figures are way out . . . What we think is that these images are also fake. We totally deny the allegation that 20,000 people were killed," said Lakshman Hulugalle, a Defence Ministry spokesman.

According to the British paper, casualty estimates were given to The Times by UN sources, who explained in detail how they arrived at that calculation. The figures had been collated from deaths reported by priests and doctors and added to a count of the bodies brought to medical centers. The 20,000 figure has also been obtained by the French daily Le Monde, which quoted UN sources as saying that the figure had been kept under wrap to avoid a diplomatic storm.