Sri Lanka's beaten presidential candidate arrested
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Arrested: General Sarath Fonseka (AFP: Indranil Mukherjee)
The main opposition candidate in Sri Lanka's recent presidential election is reportedly facing charges of plotting to overthrow the government after being arrested overnight.
General Sarath Fonseka was arrested at the offices of the main opposition alliance which had backed his unsuccessful presidential campaign against the incumbent Mahinda Rajapaksa.
A Sri Lankan military spokesman says the retired general will face charges of "military offences" he allegedly committed while the head of the nation's armed forces.
General Fonseka rejected the result of the elections and vowed to challenge it in court.
General Fonseka was in charge of Sri Lanka's armed forces during the defeat of the Tamil Tigers in the country's long-running civil war.
Since then however, he has fallen out with Mr Rajapaksa and faced off against him the bitterly contested election.
Meanwhile the former spokesman for the United Nations in Sri Lanka, Gordon Weiss, says he believes the Sri Lankan government should be investigated for war crimes against Tamil civilians.
In an exclusive interview to be aired on ABC1's Foreign Correspondent, Mr Weiss accuses Sri Lanka of deliberately misleading the UN about the scale of civilian casualties.
Mr Weiss says up to 40,000 civilians were killed in the military offensive against the Tamil Tigers last year.
He says during the civil war, Mr Rajapaksa consistently reassured the UN that civilians were being protected.
"The real situation I think is obvious from the sorts of numbers of civilians that I believe died there," he said
"They were within range of all the armaments that were being used, whether those were small arms from rifles or the larger armaments such as the mortar pieces and artillery pieces that were being used to smash the Tamil Tiger lines."
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