17 aid workers were killed in Muttur on 04 August, 2006

The agency - Action Against Hunger (ACF) - accused the Sri Lankan government of lacking the will to find those responsible for the murder of the aid workers in the northeastern town of Muttur.

At the time of the killings, European truce monitors said they believed troops were involved, but the government's own inquiry said the military was not responsible.

Heavy fighting had been going on in the area between troops and Tamil rebels fighting for an independent state.

'No evidence'

All but one of the aid workers were ethnic Tamils. The military was engaged in heavy fighting with Tamil Tiger rebels in the region at the time.

	The chairman says there was no evidence to suggest that the forces were involved

"The evidence that was laid before us is that not a single witness stated before us that they saw the army around the place at the relevant time," the head of the commission, retired Supreme Court Judge Nissanka Udalagama, told the BBC's Sinhala service, Sandeshaya.

"The entire town was taken over by the LTTE [Tamil Tiger rebels] at the time. The LTTE said on their website that they had taken over the town of Muttur," he said.

Impunity

Human rights groups however accused the government of failing to punish rights violators.

The Sri Lankan group University Teachers for Human Rights said the government had to be held to account "to stop this culture of impunity in the country".

"The way in which the government handled the whole investigation - the pressure put on witnesses, the video conferencing through which witnesses tried to bring out information on how it was stopped - basically show that the commission was not interested in finding the true culprits," a spokesman for the group, Gopalasingham Sridharan, told BBC Tamil service.