'Lanka ready to welcome more Tamil refugees from India'

Sri Lanka will welcome more Tamilrefugees who fled the country to India and want to return homeafter nearly three decades of war with the LTTE, a topminister has said.

"They have been returning from time to time, in smallgroups. My ministry along with the defence ministry wouldjointly welcome them if more want to return. They could beresettled in their places of origin," resettlement ministerGunaratne Weerakoon told PTI.

According to statistics more than 100,000 Sri Lankanrefugees are in Tamil Nadu, out of which some 68,000 arehoused in 112 government-run camps.

More than 5,000 Lankans have returned to the islandnation under a UNHCR-facilitated voluntary repatriationscheme.

They are the Tamils who fled fighting in the north andeast during the separatist military campaign of LTTE.

Since the war ended in 2009, normalcy is returninggradually to the former conflict zones in Sri Lanka.

A large number of the nation's Tamils fled overseas,mostly to Western nations and India, in the wake of theconflict between the government and LTTE in the mid-1980s.

The Sri Lankan army defeated LTTE in May 2009 to endthe nearly three decades of bloody civil war.