As Commonwealth leaders prepare to meet at a summit in the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, allegations of rape and torture by the Sri Lankan security forces have emerged, some of them occurring four years after the civil war ended.
"When the lady left and that man closed the door, I knew what was going to happen," says Vasantha. "They raped me."
One evening earlier this year, Vasantha says, she was going back to her home in northern Sri Lanka when a white van drew up and two men asked for her identity card.
She says she was thrown into the back of the vehicle and blindfolded.
Vasantha says she realised the authorities had finally caught up with her, four years after the war and just as she was about to leave for Britain on a student visa.
Her story is one of a number given to the BBC, horrific accounts of torture carried out long after hostilities ended.
During the civil war, Vasantha had helped Tamil Tiger rebels pass messages and set up safe houses in the capital, but she says she never took part in the fighting or held a gun.
Like other women I have interviewed, Vasantha never saw the outside of the building where she was held or met another detainee, but she said she did hear female voices, screaming in Tamil.
She describes being photographed and fingerprinted and then kicked, beaten with batons and pipes, burned with hot wires and cigarettes, submerged in a barrel of water until she thought she would drown, suffocated by having a petrol-soaked plastic bag put over her head, before being repeatedly raped by men in army uniform.
She says she signed a confession in a language she could not understand - Sinhala - but the torture and rape went on for 20 days before a relative could find her and pay a bribe for her release.
For the last three days, she remembers her skin itching terribly in a filthy cell as she was kept completely naked.
