The Sri Lankan high commissioner to India Prasad Kariyawasam said the pictures of Prabhakaran's son were morphed and were being circulated ahead of the UNHRC meeting to embarrass his government.

"These allegations are not new. We deny allegations based on morphed photos from London. The Sri Lankan army saved thousands of civilians from the LTTE. This poor child may have died as a result of crossfire when his father kept fighting," he said in New Delhi.

A series of photographs show Balachandran Prabhakaran, son of Villupillai Prabhakaran, who was head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). According to the Independent, one of the photos shows the boy sitting in a bunker, alive and unharmed, apparently in the custody of Sri Lankan troops.

Another picture which was taken a few hours later shows the boy's body lying on the ground, with four bullet holes in his chest.

The images were taken in May 2009 at the end of the Sri Lankan Government's operation to crush the LTTE, which had launched a bloody, decades-long insurgency against the state that led to the deaths of perhaps 70,000 people.

According to the report, the authorities always said Prabhakaran's son was killed in cross-fire, as troops moved in to take the LTTE's last stronghold. But the images, contained in a new documentary, No Fire Zone, which will be screened at the Geneva Human Rights Film Festival during the UN Human Rights Council meeting in March, suggest the boy was captured alive and killed at a later stage. A forensic pathologist who examined the later images for the film-makers, said the boy was shot five times in the chest.