A U.N. rights watchdog called on Sri Lanka on Wednesday to investigate "routine torture" of detainees by security forces and rebuked its government for failing to prosecute war crimes committed during the country's 26-year conflict, Reuters reported.

The Sri Lankan military finally vanquished the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan guerrillas in 2009. The United Nations and rights activists have accused the military of killing thousands of civilians, mostly Tamils, during the final weeks of the war and have demanded reforms and redress.

In a report, the United Nations Committee against Torture cited continuing reports of abductions of people disappearing into "white vans", deaths in custody, poor conditions of detention and the use of forced confessions in court.

"We wanted to make it clear that the present is a problem as well (as the past)," longtime committee member Felice Gaer told a news briefing in Geneva, reported Reuters.

There was no immediate comment from Sri Lankan authorities. But the committee's report said the Sri Lankan attorney general, Jayantha Jayasuriya, had told its investigators that his government had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to torture.

The panel of 10 independent experts voiced alarm that a member of the government delegation sent to Geneva was suspected of holding "command responsibility" over the most notorious Colombo center for abuse in the last two years of the conflict.

The recommendations cited "consistent reports" from national and U.N. sources that torture remains common in regular criminal investigations in the South Asian island country.

"The Committee is concerned that the broad police powers to arrest suspects without a court warrant has led to the practice of detaining persons while conducting the investigations as a means to obtain information under duress," it said.

The panel urged Sri Lanka to identify and prosecute perpetrators of "emblematic cases" from the conflict, including the murders in 2006 of the "Trincomalee Five" students, all Tamils, on a beach and 17 local staff members - 16 of them Tamils - of the French charity Action Against Hunger.

Gaer, asked about those cases, said: "What we saw was that there had been promises but that there weren't investigations, that the investigations weren't moving forward.

"We didn't see evidence that the government is moving on the accountability issues either, the truth commission issues that it promised it would institute," she said.

The Tamil Tigers were also accused of widespread wartime abuses, such as using child soldiers and targeting civilians with suicide bombers.