COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — The Sri Lankan president says he will not allow a U.N. panel investigating allegations of war crimes to visit Sri Lanka.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa told foreign journalists on Tuesday that he does not accept any investigation by the United Nations into allegations of abuses by his soldiers and the defeated Tamil Tiger rebels at the end of the country’s civil war in 2009.

The U.N. human rights chief appointed a three-member panel in June to look into the allegations.

An earlier U.N report said up to 40,000 ethnic Tamil civilians may have been killed in just the last months of a quarter-century civil war.

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