By P Sivaramakrishnan BBC Tamil service

	Tamil MP says IDPs are paying huge amounts of money to smugglers

Sivanathan Kishore a member of the Tamil National Alliance says that “smuggling of people from these camps is going on for some time.”

People in the camps have been paying huge money to get themselves out of the camps and some of them have even been escorted till the airport and have gone abroad, according to the MP.

The Sri Lanka government said it was aware of the issue.

Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa told BBC that the government has evidence that some people, mostly Tamil Tiger suspects, had escaped recently from the tightly guarded camps in the north.

'Unconstitutional'

The modus operandi according the TNA MP Sivanathan Kishore, include people being brought out of the camps under the guise of sick patients and then taken to other places.

	Mr. Rajapaksa says the government is aware of the problem

He did not want to inform this to the concerned authorities, he says, since these IDPs are suffering in the camps.

According to the TNA MP every thing including the housing of these people in the camps, smuggling them from the camps, paying money to do so are unconstitutional and hence he is not interfering in this.

The MP says that he expects to discuss the issue with the president and his senior adviser Basil Rajapaksa, MP.

Government response

Responding, the defence secretary said: "We have evidence that some people have gone to India, Singapore, Malaysia and to Europe”.

The government has taken action against a "very small minority" of security service personnel were involved in the racket, he said.

The defence secretary said all the displaced people in camps had been registered and accounted for with the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

"If these people go out without our knowledge, ultimately the government is responsible," he said.