19 July 2010. On 12 April 2011 the panel handed over its report, the Report of the Secretary-General's Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka, to the Secretary-General who passed on a copy to the Sri Lankan government. The Sri Lankan government immediately rejected the report as "fundamentally flawed" and "patently biased". The report was not initially made public to allow the Sri Lankan government time to make a formal reply. On 16 April 2011 the report was published in The Island, an-independently owned nationalist Sri Lankan newspaper. It had been suggested that the Sri Lankan government leaked the report so that it can issue a full rebuttal before of the report is officially made public by the UN. The Sri Lankan government did not make a formal reply and on 25 April 2011 the UN published the full report. The evidence obtained by the panel revealed "a very different version of the final stages of the war than that maintained to this day by the Government of Sri Lanka". The panel found "credible allegations, which if proven, indicate that a wide range of serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law were committed both by the Government of Sri Lanka and the LTTE, some of which would amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity". The panel concluded that the "conduct of the war represented a grave assault on the entire regime of international law designed to protect individual dignity during both war and peace". The panel found "credible allegations" that the Sri Lankan military/government killed civilians through widespread shelling; shelled hospitals and humanitarian objects; denied humanitarian assistance; violated the human rights of civilians and Tamil Tiger combatants; and it violated the human rights of those outside the conflict zone such as the media. The panel found "credible allegations" that the Tamil Tigers used civilians as a human buffer; killed civilians attempting to escape Tamil Tiger control; used military equipment in the proximity of civilians; forcibly recruited children; used forced labour; and killed civilians using suicide attacks. Specific findings of the panel: In regard to crimes by the Sri Lankan government: The Sri Lankan military used large-scale and widespread shelling causing large numbers of civilian deaths. This constituted persecution of the population of the Vanni. The Sri Lankan government tried to intimidate and silence the media and other critics of the war using a variety