Thirteen nails and five needles removed from woman who says they were hammered into her by Saudi employers

Doctors have removed 13 nails and five needles from a Sri Lankan maid who said her employers in Saudi Arabia had hammered them into her.

LG Ariyawathi, who returned home from Saudi Arabia on Saturday and was hospitalised in severe pain, said the family she worked for had punished her by heating the nails and needles and sticking them into her.

X-rays showed she had 24 nails and needles in her body, said Dr Keerthi Satharasinghe, of Kamburupitiya hospital. The nails ranged in length from 2.5 to 5cm (one to two inches), and the needles were about 2.5cm. They were removed from Ariyawathi’s legs and forehead.

“The surgery is successful and she is recovering now,” Satharasinghe said after a three-hour procedure. He said six more needles in her hands could not be removed because the operation might damage her nerves and arteries, but they would not be harmful to her.

Ariyawathi, 49, has described the abuse meted out by her employers. “They did not allow me even to rest. The woman at the house had heated the nails and then the man inserted them into my body,” she was quoted as saying by the Lakbima newspaper.

She said she went to Saudi Arabia in March and was paid only two months’ salary, with her employer withholding the rest to buy an air ticket to send her home.

About 1.5 million Sri Lankans work abroad, many as maids or drivers, to earn more than they can in their own country. Nearly 400,000 work in Saudi Arabia.

Sri Lanka’s foreign employment bureau said Ariyawathi had been too afraid to complain to Saudi authorities, fearing that her employers might not let her return home. The deputy minister of economic development, Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena, said the government would report the matter to the Saudi government and provide her with compensation.

Saudi officials did not respond to requests for comment. Nimal Ranawaka, at the Sri Lankan embassy in Riyadh, said the embassy had requested a meeting with Saudi officials. “We informed Saudi authorities. They have to take action against the employer,” Ranawaka said.

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LT Ariyawathi says her employers hammered the nails into her after she complained that her workload was too heavy

A Saudi couple tortured their Sri Lankan maid by hammering 24 nails into her hands, legs and forehead, after she complained of a too heavy workload, officials said today.

Nearly 2 million Sri Lankans sought employment overseas last year and around 1.4 million, mostly maids, were employed in the Middle East. Many have complained of physical abuse or harassment. LT Ariyawathi, a 49-year old mother of three, returned home on Friday after five months in Saudi Arabia.

Her family only realised what had happened to her when she complained of pain and they took her to see the doctor, Foreign Employment Bureau officials said.

“The landlord and the wife of the landlord hammered 24 nails into her when she complained of the heavy workload,” Kalyana Priya Ramanayake, media secretary of the Foreign Employment Bureau, said.

Ariyawathi has been taken to hospital for surgery to remove the nails, which according to the maid were hammered in when they were hot.

X-rays showed one- to two-inch nails in her hands and legs, with one over her eyes, officials said.

The Foreign Employment Bureau is consulting the attorney-general while the Sri Lankan External Affairs Ministry is to take the matter up with the Saudi government, officials said.

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Populist politicians have seized on the Sun Sea Tamil refugees to ramp up anti-immigrant rhetoric, reneging on human rights

Earlier this month, a boat carrying 492 Tamils claiming to be refugees from Sri Lanka’s recently ended 26-year civil war arrived in Canada on the MV Sun Sea, having set sail two and half months earlier. Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) is now processing the asylum claims of those on board.

While the 492 refugee claimants represent only around 2% of Canada’s annual refugee intake, the MV Sun Sea has been taken on as a symbol of the spectre of a refugee influx, notably by the conservative National Post newspaper and Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. A former chair of the IRB has disputed the public safety minister’s claim that smugglers and terrorists were on board the ship.

Before each MV Sun Sea asylum case has had a chance to be reviewed, the idea that the ship represents a “public safety” problem and the tip of a “refugee influx” has come to dominate discussion of the MV Sun Sea, which risks influencing the cases of the asylum seekers, as well as effecting changes in Canadian law.

Although a 1985 supreme court ruling guarantees constitutional charter rights to refugee claimants in Canada, the government has indicated that it is reviewing relevant legislation in order to deter further ships. The prime minister, Stephen Harper, has argued that the Conservative government “will not hesitate to strengthen the laws if we have to”.

With this heightened focus on the spectre of an asylum seeker influx, Canada shows signs of heading the way of Australia, which briefly stopped accepting refugees from Sri Lanka this year, on the argument that the situation in the country has improved sufficiently since the end of the conflict in 2009 – although Australia’s own human rights commission expressed concern at the decision, which has since been revoked. As Australia went to the polls last week, the asylum debate between the two main parties came down to an argument about which island to detain them on, and the UN high commissioner for refugees has expressed concern that the number of Afghan refugees accepted by Australia has declined since last year. It’s alarming that a similar tone has begun to surface in Canada over the last few weeks, with calls to “turn back” the ships before they reach Canadian waters.

Immigration lawyers have pointed out that the boats carrying asylum seekers can’t be turned back in international waters, as their right to life entails their refugee status must be determined through a fair trial, rather than on the high seas before it can be judged whether they have a valid fear of persecution. The MV Sun Sea has captured the public imagination, but it presents a distorted view of the process of Canada’s refugee system: contrary to the perception of a “refugee influx”, in which anyone who comes to Canada by boat gets a free pass, Canada last year cut its refugee targets for 2010, and more and more failed claimants are being sent back. And while it has been argued that many on board the ships are not genuine asylum seekers, of 76 Sri Lankan Tamils who arrived in Canada by boat last October, none were declared ineligible to make a claim for asylum.

Paul Dewar, an opposition MP for the New Democratic party, has argued that the government should concentrate on helping Sri Lanka rebuild after its devastating civil war, rather than focusing on turning Tamils away from Canada. At the very least, Canada should make sure Australia’s poisonous discourse on refugees does not reach its shores.

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MV Sun Sea intercepted after Sri Lankan official warns vessel is part of human smuggling operation linked to Tamil Tigers

Canadian security officials yesterday boarded a cargo ship carrying hundreds of Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, including some Canada has said may be terrorists.

The country’s public safety minister, Vic Toews, said the MV Sun Sea was carrying 490 people the vessel identified as refugees. But he said the government had concerns that there may be members of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, on board. Canada has listed the Tamil Tigers a terrorist group since 2006.

Chitranganee Wagiswara, Sri Lanka’s high commissioner to Canada, has said Ottawa should not accept the Tamils’ claims for refugee status and said the ship was part of a human smuggling operation linked to the Tamil Tigers.

Toews said the ship was boarded by navy, police and border services officials. The ship is currently being escorted to a navy base on Vancouver Island, and those on board have been offered water and food.

The government has been preparing tents at coastal military facilities to house those on board, and jails have been warned they could receive new inmates.

“Human smuggling is a despicable crime and any attempted abuses of our nation’s generosity for financial gain are utterly unacceptable,” Toews said in a statement. “Those aboard this vessel will be processed by Canada Border Services Agency officials under Canadian law.”

Canada would look at all available options to strengthen Canadian laws and address the “unacceptable abuse of international law and Canadian generosity”, he added.

The MV Sun Sea reportedly approached Australia a few months ago but was either turned away or feared it wouldn’t be allowed to dock and set sail for Canada. The Canadian government is worried more ships are on the way.

Canada is home to about 300,000 Tamils, the largest such population outside Sri Lanka and India. But Ottawa is worried that the country is gaining a reputation of being too receptive.

Last October a ship carrying 76 migrants was intercepted in Canadian waters after crossing the Pacific from Sri Lanka. The group on board the Ocean Lady claimed to be fleeing persecution.

All of the men were immediately detained in jails in the Vancouver area, but most were released within weeks and only one remained in custody on suspicion of being a Tamil Tiger. He too was released earlier this year.

The Tamil Tigers fought a civil war for a quarter of a century seeking a state independent of the ruling Sinhalese majority. The Sri Lankan conflict ended in May 2009 after a devastating government operation against the rebels.

Toews has said the group used suicide bombings against civilians in Sri Lanka, as well as extortion and intimidation to raise funds among Canada’s Tamil community.

He also said Canada would prosecute anyone deemed to be human smugglers or terrorists.

“While our government believes in offering protection to genuine refugees, it is imperative that we prevent supporters and members of a criminal or terrorist organisation from abusing Canada’s refugee system,” he said.

Legal aid officials have called in immigration lawyers to act as duty counsel for the migrants once they arrive, and members of the Canadian Tamil Congress were travelling to British Columbia to offer their assistance. A local hospital had set aside a special area for any passengers requiring medical attention.

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Sarath Fonseka found guilty of being involved in politics while in the military after entering presidential race this year

A Sri Lankan military court today convicted the former amy chief who led the victory over the Tamil Tiger rebels of involvement in politics while in uniform.

General Sarath Fonseka, who is in military custody, will be stripped of his rank, military honours and pension if President Mahinda Rajapaksa approves the verdict. Fonseka’s lawyer, Rienzie Arsecularatne, denounced the ruling and said the case was heard in his absence during a court vacation.

“They went ahead and fixed the court martial on the days I was not available,” said Arsecularatne said. “This is not a proper trial. This is a total miscarriage of justice.”

Fonseka is expected to make an appeal in a civilian court.

Fonseka’s Democratic National Alliance party rejected the verdict, saying he should not have been tried by a military court because he had retired from the army. Human rights groups criticised the use of closed-door military courts instead of civilian courts.

The 60-year-old general, who faces a second court martial for alleged corruption, led the campaign that crushed the Tamil Tigers last year. Although the victory ended 25 years of civil war in which between 80,000 and 100,000 people died, the military’s tactics led to widespread international condemnation. The UN says at least 7,000 civilians were killed in the last five months of the war that ended in May last year.

General and president both claimed credit for the Tigers’ defeat, but fell out with each other and the rift deepened when Fonseka retired from the army to challenge Rajapaksa for the presidency in an acrimonious and sometimes violent campaign.

After a resounding defeat in the election in January, Fonseka was arrested the following month, accused of planning his political career while still in the army – a crime in Sri Lanka. Fonseka’s arrest and detention triggered protests at the time, but have since fizzled out and the opposition has been weakened by splits. Despite being in military custody, Fonskea managed to win a seat in parliament in April.

The military campaign against the Tamil Tigers last year continues to dog the Sri Lankan government. The US state department this week criticised Colombo for failing to properly investigate alleged crimes against humanity in the last months of the conflict.

An 18-page report looked into how the Sri Lankan government investigated 300 incidents cited in an earlier state department report that included allegations of forcible recruitment and unlawful use of children, harm to civilians resulting from shelling, killing of captives or combatants seeking to surrender and the denial of food and medical supplies to civilians.

The state department described one government inquiry as “ineffective” and raised concerns about the mandate and independence of a second.

In June, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, appointed a three-member panel to advise him on ensuring accountability for the alleged abuses during the war, but Sri Lanka has refused to co-operate, saying an external panel is an infringement of the country’s sovereignty.

The US embassy in Colombo last month warned of the growing danger to press freedom after a dozen men armed with assault rifles and petrol bombs attacked the offices of privately owned TV station Voice of Asia Network.

The attack followed the disappearance of Prageeth Eknaligoda, a political columnist and cartoonist with Lankaenews.com, who criticised the government during the election. He is believed to have been abducted while on his way home from work in January and has not been seen since. Rajapaksa has been accused by political opponents and international human rights groups of suppressing dissent since his re-election.

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Human rights groups say government-appointed inquiry flawed because it has no mandate to investigate alleged war crimes in 2009 conflict

A government-appointed commission examining Sri Lanka’s civil war began public hearings today amid international scepticism about its credibility.

The commission has no mandate to investigate allegations that thousands of civilians died in the final months of the conflict.

The United Nations has said that at least 7,000 civilians were killed in the five months before the end of the war in May 2009, when government forces finally crushed ethnic Tamil rebels who had been fighting for an independent state for a quarter of a century.

The rebels had claimed marginalisation of minority Tamils by ethnic Sinhalese-controlled governments.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa appointed the commission in May, a year after the end of the conflict, to determine why a ceasefire brokered by Norway and signed by the government and Tamil Tigers in 2002 had collapsed.

Human rights groups say the commission is aimed at deflecting calls for an international inquiry into alleged war crimes including the government shelling of civilians.

In June, the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, appointed a three-member panel to advise him on ensuring accountability for the alleged abuses during the war.

Sri Lanka has refused to cooperate with the panel or issue visas for its members, saying an external panel is an infringement of the country’s sovereignty.

The commission chairman, CR de Silva, said in his opening remarks today that the time had come to “consolidate the military victory by addressing the root causes of the conflict and establish national integrity and reconciliation”.

The commission began its hearings with presentations by the ex-Sri Lankan ambassador to the US Bernard Gunatillake, also a former government peace negotiator with the Tigers.

Gunatillake said the Tigers were not sincere in peace talks that followed the 2002 ceasefire and were buying time for another war.

He called for the immediate resettlement of tens of thousands of displaced civilians still living in camps and the return of private land and houses occupied by the army as important steps towards long-term peace.

Hearings also will be conducted in ethnic Tamil areas to allow people to air grievances, de Silva said.

The hearings will be held in public except when witnesses ask for a closed session or sensitive security details are discussed, he added.

In addition to accusations of indiscriminate shelling, rights groups have also accused government forces of having blocked access to food and medicine for minority Tamil civilians trapped in the war.

The rebels have been accused of holding civilians as human shields, killing those trying to escape the violence and forcibly recruiting children as fighters.

Earlier this year, the International Crisis Group thinktank said in a report that at least 30,000 civilians could have died in the final stages of the war.

It said it had calculated the figure by comparing the original population of the war zone with the number who escaped the fighting.

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Perhaps Birmingham wasn’t such a bad place for the postponed debut of the latest member of the Bhutto clan to enter politics

It was always an unlikely location for the crown prince of Pakistan to be formally presented to his nation. Birmingham is a long way from the bustle of Karachi, the bazaars of Peshawar or the barracks of Rawalpindi.

But it was in the Midlands city that President Asif Ali Zardari, the current leader of Pakistan, was supposed to watch over the political coming out of his son Bilawal today.

In the event, the investiture of the 21-year-old scion of the Bhutto dynasty was postponed – due to the humanitarian crisis back home in Pakistan. But that it will one day take place seems inevitable. The south Asian dynasties remain strong.

In India, the great local democracy, Rahul Gandhi, 40, is almost certain to succeed the incumbent Manmoham Singh at some stage to become a fourth-generation prime minister, or at least principal candidate. In Bangladesh, the decades-old rivalry between Begum Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina Wazed for control of the country continues that between the late husband of one and the father of the other. Both died bloodily.

In Burma, Nobel prize-winning opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of assassinated nationalist leader Aung San. In Sri Lanka, the son of controversial president Mahinda Rajapaksa has just won a seat in the family fief of Hambantota. At state or provincial level in all these countries, similar dynamics are at work.

Experts point to different reasons for the tenacity of dynastic politics in the subcontinent. One is the need for any successful politician to bolster the hold on power by recruiting loyal retainers who will not defect for material gain; another is the importance of personalities in contests stripped of ideological content; a third is high levels of illiteracy, which make a famous name a determining factor for tens of millions of voters.

One common strand uniting the dynasties is that most of them speak English as a first language. Along with railways and a swollen bureaucracy, it may be that British rule bequeathed something else too: a taste for hereditary power.

The UK may not be so inappropriate a location for the crown prince of Pakistan to receive his sword and sceptre after all – if, of course, he does eventually decide to enter politics.

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Sri Lankan military take down my videos and bully my fans, says the controversial star on a trawl through her web profile. But she’s fighting back by communicating in characters

“Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam (born 18 July 1975), better known by her stage name MIA, is a Sri Lankan/British songwriter, record producer, singer, rapper, fashion designer, visual artist, and political activist.” And right now, perched on a sofa at the XL Records office in west London, staring into her gold Apple MacBook, MIA is reading the above words on her Wikipedia entry. Seven years after her first single Galang spread across the web like an art-school-incubated virus – confirming her status as one of the first pop stars of the digital age – she’s back with /\/\/\Y/\ (or Maya, for those who can decipher the slashes), and the Guardian has asked her to talk us through her online presence in an attempt to sort fact from fiction. On paper this sounds like a straightforward process. In reality though, as with MIA’s music, a single answer can see her head off across continents on dizzying tangents, and encompass pop references, multi-layered political rants, occasional bouts of paranoia, identity politics, and what was the question again?

We meet 10 days after the music blogs have gone into meltdown following her “trufflegate” feud with the New York Times after its writer Lynn Hirschberg suggested MIA wasn’t as 4REAL as she claims. MIA responded by posting the writer’s mobile number on Twitter and uploading a clip of the interview online. “This is the new shit,” she says unabashedly. “This is the new way to interpret the news for artists because we have got the internet, we have got Twitter, we have got all our fans right there. So why do you have to let someone like Lynn shit on you?”

A prolific web user, she says she doesn’t really have a favourite go-to website or music blog because she doesn’t trust many of them. “I do go on my Twitter [@_M_I_A_] and look at what my fans say though,” she admits. “If my fans are funny then I’ll retweet and read what they’re saying about other shit.” Other than that she says she spends a lot of time looking at “stoopid shit”, Mexican gangs, Islamic art, images of “3D mosques”, and web art, which is where she discovered the photo illusions of Jaime Martinez and signed him to her label NEET.

Recently, MIA also warned fans that Google was developed with the help of CIA seed money. And her new album opens with The Message, a robotic skit that goes: “iPhone’s connected to the internet connected to the Google connected to the government.” Still, she’s game for our Google challenge. Let the digital dissection begin …

MIA on her Wikipedia entry

Firstly, we ask her to pull up her Wikipedia entry. It’s fairly generic, detailing everything from her name in Tamil script to her love of Harmony Korine and radical cinema. “I hate my Wikipedia page,” she announces as soon as it loads up. “It’s really boring to look at. I’d get rid of all this white space. And I’d make the font a bit more interesting.” If you’ve ever seen the fluoro overload of her own website or Twitter page this should come as no surprise. As Wikipedia is notorious for its user-generated inaccuracies and also prone to sabotage, has she – as someone with form in using the net to set the record straight – ever doctored her own entry? “No,” she insists. “I really don’t know how to do that.”

We scroll through the page. In the “Art and Film” sub-section it says, “Jude Law was among early buyers of artwork” after her stint at St Martins. That’s a lie, surely?

“It’s true, actually. He said that his house got burgled and someone took it, though.” So, somewhere in London a burglar is sitting on an original MIA print? “Yeah and he’s probably, like, peed on it or something and couldn’t give a shit,” she jokes. We whizz through the sections on her time working with Elastica and meeting electro sex pest Peaches who encouraged her to make music – all true. Is there anything on here that is incorrect? “Are you working for Wikipedia?” she laughs. “I haven’t actually read it in detail but … I thought it was interesting that the section on Diplo got removed when we stopped working together. He emailed me about that; that’s why I know that section’s missing.”

Does she know who removed it? “I have no idea.”

MIA on why her new album is un-Googleable

MIA often tweets using nothing but keystrokes and punctuation. So it’s hardly surprising that she used the outer reaches of the keyboard to spell out the title of new album, /\/\/\Y/\. Why? “I know it’s hard,” she says sarcastically, “but once we get there it’s gonna be OK. You’re learning to use keys that are not letters …” She instructs me to type: “Forward strike, backwards strike, forward strike, backwards strike and so on, then Y for ‘Why are we doing this?’ [laughs] Then we go back to forward strike …”

So we put /\/\/\Y/\ into Google, hit return and – drum roll, please! – no matches are returned (possibly because Google doesn’t recognise slashes as characters). “OK, it doesn’t come up, yeah, but one day that’ll be coded and take you somewhere amazing.” Ask her why she didn’t choose something more Google-friendly and her response is another declaration of war on The Man: “To resist the internet is really difficult to do. I mean, there are so many cunts on there. Loads of Wall Street dudes are stepping on to the internet and seeing it as the gold rush and I think it’s [about] not wanting to be used for that reason …”

MIA on the music blogs

On the day of our interview, the music blogs are running a story about the appearance of a new MIA vocal on a track called Toldya by British outfit Sali. It rates highly when we first Google “MIA” (alongside the Born Free video and, unexpectedly, her version of The Wire theme with Baltimore’s Blaqstarr). NME.com, meanwhile, runs the story as “MIA lends her vocals to new underground track Toldya.” So, how did the track come about? “That’s not me,” she quickly corrects. “It’s somebody that’s taken a bit of my song and now they’re saying that I worked with them. They asked for permission but I didn’t write back so they put it out anyway.” She sighs: “I already have to deal with being misrepresented all the fucking time but when it’s people you know adding to it, then it gets really hard.”

And there’s another misconception that she’d like to clear up: that former boyfriend and collaborator Diplo produced her first album. “That annoys the fuck out of me because I met him way after I finished it. Everyone is always [adopts mardy voice], ‘The producer who made all the songs.’ If you read the credits, he worked on one song and that’s just putting somebody else’s song next to my vocal. Diplo was the mediator with the phone numbers.”

MIA on YouTube (and the Sri Lankan government)

MIA’s fraught relationship with the Sri Lankan government has been well documented. She named her first album after her father, Arular, a key member of the Tamil separatist movement, and his links to the Tamil Tigers have earned her a “terrorist sympathiser” tag. She has spoken out against the events which last year saw Tamil civilians rounded up and placed in prison camps after the defeat of Tamil Tigers; she says she agreed to perform at the Grammys with Jay-Z, Kanye and Lil Wayne to bring international attention to the cause. She’s also tweeted links to executions carried out by the Sri Lankan government. But it’s when we direct her to YouTube that she really begins to vent. Type “MIA” into the site and her Clash-sampling, film-soundtrack-bothering global hit Paper Planes is the first video up. But it’s hosted by US video channel Vevo, not by her own channel, or any of her fans.

“They buried my Paper Planes, none of my fucking shit comes up,” she says. “All my videos have been constantly pulled, the latest thing that’s up there is from 11 months ago.”

Who’s pulling them? The record company?

“No, the Sri Lankan government is writing to them and saying, ‘If you stick MIA videos up we’re gonna take you to jail for supporting terrorism.’”

What follows is a convoluted, impassioned, 15-minute rant covering death squads, Californian internet servers and Sri Lanka’s defence minister. In summary, here are the key points:

1) The Sri Lankan government bombarded fans who uploaded her videos, asking them to remove them: “They’ve Facebooked and MySpaced my fans saying, ‘If you support this person you’ll get done for terrorism because under the PTA [Prevention of Terrorism Act] you’re supporting someone who supports a terrorist group and you’re a terrorist because it covers anything to do with affiliation.’”

2) For a developing country, the government is also scarily clued-up when it comes to the internet, due to its IT links with the west: “They really fucking know what they’re fucking doing and it’s crazy fucked-up that I am the first artist on the internet who happened to be a Tamil. And the first government that took down the Tamils is the most internet-championing family of the third world. So it was a battle of the internet when we got on there.”

3) Her track Sunshowers from 2004 is one of the oldest MIA videos on YouTube. It’s hosted by someone called TubeyBooby and the user comments tell their own story. “He’s the only fan that’s got shit up,” she says with pride. “Whoever he is and wherever he is, he doesn’t give a fuck, I like him … I have the Sunshowers comments printed out.” There are 10,000 of them, she says, and if you look, you can see where “the military started going in and commenting”.

4) By 2008, she says, the propaganda was kicking in and she was “getting boxed in by my own shit”. But she doesn’t regret anything she’s done or said and puts it down to experience: “That’s a great lesson to learn, like, this is how it can be manipulated.”

MIA on internet skits

As things are, unsurprisingly, getting a little heavy, the Guardian suggests we lighten the mood by searching for “MIA + comedy”. “Didn’t you find my Born Free video funny?” she jokes, about the Romain-Gavras video which comes with an age restriction on YouTube. “I try to be funny but it’s always misconstrued.” Although there’s a great sketch in which comedian Aziz Ansari tells how he planned to employ his best Tamil chat-up line on MIA, little comes up. However, one site does: Amiright.com advertises itself as “making fun of music, one song at a time” and includes parody songs (All He Wants To Do Is Shoot And Kill Bugs Bunny to the tune of Paper Planes) and a section called “change a song letter in a song title” which sees MIA’s Galang become Galant, a Mitsubishi car model. MIA stares at it blankly.

“What? That’s meant to be funny? There’s loads of fun stuff in my songs; you’ll get it if you listen,” she protests. “Anyway, I say jokes and people think it’s the most fucking controversial thing anyone’s ever said. The thing I said about Justin Bieber was a joke but no one got it …” (She said she found his video “more violent and more of an assault to my eyes and senses than what I’ve made.”).

“So I’m not gonna say jokes any more,” she jokes. “You can’t trick me, I’m not gonna walk into that trap.”

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He was a leading figure in the archaeology and culture of India and the sub-continent

The archaeologist Raymond Allchin, who has died aged 86, first became fascinated with the cultural history of India while stationed there with the Royal Corps of Signals towards the end of the second world war. Indian partition and independence in 1947 threatened to extinguish British involvement in the study of the region’s archaeology, but Raymond did much to sustain it by training generations of lecturers, field archaeologists and curators, first at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London, and then at Cambridge University.

He was also active in the field, his first independent project tackling the problem of the interpretation of the ash mounds in Mysore and Andhra Pradesh, in southern India. These enigmatic circular mounds survived up to 10 metres in height and were known to be formed of alternating layers of ash and vitrified materials. Some previous investigators had suggested that they were the sites of medieval iron-working.

Raymond selected one of the best-preserved, Utnur, and began to excavate. In a single season in 1957, he cut through metres of cinder and ash, and discovered that the mounds were formed by series of superimposed burnt circular stockades. Disproving the medieval hypothesis, he dated them far earlier, to the neolithic of south India (c3000BC), on account of the associated polished stone axes.

He interpreted them as annual cattle camps, whose accumulations of dung were burnt at the end of each grazing season, thus creating a regular sequence of ash and cinder. This discovery allowed him to distinguish a distinct cultural sequence for peninsular India from its neolithic to its iron-age megalithic cemeteries, as well as providing him with the opening to his report Neolithic Cattle-keepers of South India (1963): “This is a book about cow-dung, or rather the ash of cow-dung.”

Raymond later developed a keen interest in the archaeology of the early historic period (c900BC-AD350), notably as to whether the Persian empire had founded the region’s earliest cities in the sixth century BC, a model favoured by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. He focused on the early urban evidence from north-west Pakistan and the cultural links between the Taxila valley’s sequence of three great early-historic cities – the Bhir Mound, Sirkap and Sirsukh – and the earlier series of megalithic cemeteries in the northern valleys of Swat, Dir and Chitral, collectively termed the Gandharan grave culture. Despite the clear later links between Taxila and those northern valleys, as epitomised by its shared Buddhist Gandharan style of sculpture, earlier evidence remained elusive, until Raymond and his wife, the prehistorian Bridget Gordon, wandered out eastwards from the Taxila site museum one February morning in 1980.

During their walk, they discovered numerous shards of a distinctive, highly burnished red ware at the foot of a spur called Hathial. Raymond immediately recognised that these shards belonged to the burnished red ware associated with the Gandharan grave culture, and dating to the beginning of the first millennium BC. By demonstrating the presence of a substantial settlement at the site, he concluded that the urban sequence of Taxila, and by extension south Asia, was under way long before Persian contact, going back to the late chalcolithic (copper age) and iron age.

Raymond made his work accessible through a series of sole, joint and edited publications. The Birth of Indian Civilisation (1968), written with Bridget, remained popular, being superseded only by their books The Rise of Indian Civilisation in India and Pakistan (1982) and The Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia (1995). His research interests beyond archaeology ranged from his critical translation of Tulsi Das’s Sanskrit classic Kavitavali to epigraphy – the study of inscriptions – and the Indian origins of distillation.

Such work attracted research students and postdoctoral fellows from across the UK and Asia to Raymond’s office in Cambridge, filled with shards, sculpture and a particularly large and animated scene of an Indic hell. He was never surprised by new or unexpected archaeological results, and this, combined with his suspicion of theoretical trends, kept his mind open and his publications up to date.

Born in Harrow, north-west London, Raymond was educated at Westminster school and had enrolled at the Regent Street Polytechnic to train as an architect when he was posted to India in 1944. On his return, he embarked on a BA in Hindi and Sanskrit at Soas, followed by a PhD in 1954, the year he was appointed a lecturer in Indian archaeology there. He moved to Cambridge in 1959 and, following a career of fieldwork and research across India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, retired with the title of emeritus reader in south Asian archaeology in 1989. He was appointed a fellow of the British Academy in 1981.

He committed the next two decades to the work of the Ancient India and Iran Trust, providing visiting academics and students with open access to books, lectures, seminars, debates and tea parties.

Raymond and Bridget were married in 1951. She survives him, as do their children, Sushila and William.

• Frank Raymond Allchin, archaeologist and writer, born 9 July 1923; died 4 June 2010

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Gobi Sivanthan walking from London to Geneva to demand UN inquiry into possible war crimes during defeat of Tamil Tigers

A British Tamil has embarked on a two-week walk from London to Geneva to ask the UN to initiate an independent investigation into allegations that war crimes were committed when the Sri Lankan government crushed the Tamil Tigers last year.

Gobi Sivanthan, 29, a businessman from Hayes, west London, left Downing Street at midnight on Saturday morning. As part of his “walk for justice”, which is due to end outside the offices of the UN human rights council on 6 August, Sivanthan is also calling for a boycott of Sri Lankan goods, for internally displaced persons to be allowed to return home, and for access to be granted to prisoners of war.

The UN estimates that about 7,000 people died in the final months of fighting that culminated in the defeat of the Tamil Tigers and the end of the island’s 25-year civil war. Human rights groups have accused government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels of targeting civilians.

The UN closed its main office in Sri Lanka this month after crowds descended on the mission to protest against the UN secretary general’s decision to set up a panel to advise him on the alleged atrocities.

Sivanthan, who lost his father and many friends in the fighting that swept the north of the island in spring last year, said the world needed to know what had happened in Sri Lanka.

Speaking from Dover today, he said: “I just want justice for all the war crimes that have been committed … people there need medication and food and they need people to investigate what happened. It was a genocide of Tamils.”

Sivanthan added: “I’m protesting in a peaceful way and not disturbing anyone. I just want to make people in the UK and France and Switzerland aware of what’s happening and why I’m walking.”

The walk is not the first time the Tamils have taken their pleas to Geneva. In February last year another British-based Tamil burned himself to death outside the UN complex there to draw attention to his people’s plight.

Suren Surendiran, a spokesman for the British Tamils Forum, said: “Gobi has lost many of his family during the war, particularly during the last days of the war. There are many Gobis in Sri Lanka and overseas who have lost mums and dads, brothers and sisters. Some of us don’t know whether our family members are living or dead. We want justice for all those who perished and for those still living.”

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