Sri Lanka Thursday delivered a withering send-off to UN human rights chief Navi Pillay, accusing her of prejudice and trying to influence an ongoing war crimes investigation against Colombo.

The Foreign Ministry said Pillay was trying to make a UN-mandated international probe follow a “preconceived trajectory” and that her “prejudice and lack of objectivity” was unfortunate.

Pillay, who is to stand down at the end of this month from her post as UN Human Rights Commissioner, was recently quoted as saying there was a “wealth of information” about alleged abuses committed by Sri Lankan security forces at the end of the country’s ethnic war in 2009.

She has also said international investigators who have been mandated by the UN Human Rights Council to look into claims of mass killings could conclude their work without actually visiting the island.

Her reported remarks about “an investigation which has commenced only recently is a clear indication of personal bias” by the former South African judge, the ministry said.

Sri Lanka has refused to cooperate with the UN probe and says it will not allow investigators access to the former war zone in the north where rights group say up to 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians were killed in the final months of a war that ended in May 2009.

Sri Lanka insists that its troops did not commit war crimes while crushing the Tamil Tiger rebel movement at the end of a conflict which stretched for more than three decades and claimed more than 100,000 lives.

“She has sought to endorse exaggerated claims of former UN sources of spurious credentials by including such uncorroborated statistics in UN documentation,” the ministry said on the eve of her leaving office.

Pillay who visited Sri Lanka last year, has previously accused President Mahinda Rajapakse’s government of becoming authoritarian and warned that rights defenders and journalists were at risk in the country. (Arab Times)