<b>Tough Terror Law, Draws Fire in Sri Lanka</b>

Juliana Liu - Lifestyle - Reuters

Colombo, Sri Lanka (Reuters) July 26 - Sri Lankan housewife Amirthalingam Kalaichelvi was relaxing on a warm September evening last year when the police barged into her home.

Thrown into a detention center with her family, the then-pregnant 28-year-old said she confessed to being a suicide bomber for separatist Tamil Tiger rebels after listening to guards beat her husband to a pulp with metal rods and threaten to stick pins into the ears of her twin toddlers.

"It was a torture chamber," the young woman, tears rolling down cheeks the color of sunbaked brick, told Reuters in a women's prison in the capital Colombo. "I had no idea why I was arrested, no idea what was written in my confession."

Kalaichelvi, an ethnic Tamil, said she was told the confession would secure her release but instead she endured hours of beatings with sand-filled plastic pipes until she miscarried on the floor of a dingy, windowless cell.

Held under Sri Lanka's Prevention of Terrorism Act, Kalaichelvi and her three-year-old twin sons spent two months in the detention center before being moved to a women's prison, a large compound shared with about 300 prisoners behind a 25-foot wall, where she waits for a court hearing.

Politicians and human rights groups say the young mother is among hundreds of people, mostly minority Tamils, languishing in overcrowded jails on the basis of confessions extracted under torture and even rape. They can wait years before they are brought before a judge.

For the Sri Lankan government, the anti-terrorism law has been a key weapon in the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which is fighting for a separate Tamil state. The conflict has claimed 64,000 lives since it erupted in 1983.

PEACE BECKONS

Police stopped arresting suspects under the act after the government signed a truce with the Tamil Tigers in February.

Activists say the government should go further and abolish the law, passed in 1979 to curb Tamil militancy, to show good faith before the start of peace talks, expected this summer.

The London-based human rights group Amnesty International says the act does not define terrorism, allows detention for up to 18 months without charge and permits convictions based solely on a confession in jail.

"The burden of disproving a confession made in police custody is on the accused," said Amnesty analyst Ingrid Massage.

Leading Tamil parliamentarian R. Sampanthan said 99 percent of people in custody under the act were held only on a confession.

Supporters say the law has helped protect civilians from potential spies and suicide bombers called Black Tigers.

In the past two decades, the rebels have deployed more than 200 Black Tigers -- some of whom blew up India's former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, the island's President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993 and its central bank in 1996.

ONLY EVIDENCE AVAILABLE

Government officials declined comment on Kalaichelvi's case but defend the use of confessions in custody, despite a ban on such admissions under other Sri Lankan laws because of fears of police brutality.

"You can't achieve a practical purpose in an investigation unless information is forthcoming," C.R. De Silva, Sri Lanka's solicitor general, told Reuters.

"People are often not willing to come forward with evidence. The PTA makes it illegal for people to withhold information."

But critics argue the law has been ineffective in stopping the war and merely added to mistrust between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils.

"What has happened is that instead of preventing terrorism it has created terrorism, mainly state terrorism," said A. Vinayagamoorthy, a pro-government Tamil member of parliament from northern Jaffna peninsula.

Vinayagamoorthy, a lawyer who has handled over 2,000 cases, said his Tamil National Alliance party was spearheading a drive to repeal the act and speed up processing of current cases.

The International Committee of the Red Cross in Colombo, which visits prisoners held by the Tigers and the government, said 641 people were known to be held under the act.

Amnesty's Massage said the attorney general's office had promised to review 85 percent of all anti-terrorism cases by the end of July, having already considered about half of all cases.

But rights groups say many detainees still sit and wait in prisons without having been charged for a crime.

Kalaichelvi has been charged, but her lawyer Eugene Mariampillai says he has no idea when her case will go to trial.

So the mother and her twins wait in a women's prison nursery under the eye of female guards who chat amiably with inmates, most of whom are being held on drugs charges.

Walking next to the compound's flower garden, Kalaichelvi blames her arrest on a neighbor who argued with her husband and then told police she had rebel connections. It is a charge she hotly denies.

"I don't want an apology, nothing from the government except to be released so the children can go to school," she said.

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