CAT/C/35/D/242/2003 Page 5 released after paying a bribe. Between 4 and 9 November 2001, he was allegedly detained and again maltreated by the CID. 2.7 On 16 November 2001, the complainant filed a second asylum application with the Swiss Embassy in Colombo and justified his failure to attend the interview on 16 March 2001 as follows: The night before the interview, security forces had been searching for him, thereby forcing him to go into hiding. He had then left Sri Lanka for Hong Kong, where immigration authorities detained him for five months because of the expiry of his visa. In October 2001, he was returned to Sri Lanka. 2.8 On 19 November 2001, the complainant Embassy in Colombo. He stated that he had left LTTE’s knowledge and had not had contact with September 2000, he had been detained for six days the CID. was interviewed at the Swiss Sri Lanka in 1996 without the Organization since then. On 29 and subjected to ill-treatment by 2.9 On 6 March 2002, the Swiss Federal Office for Refugees (BFF) authorized the complainant’s travel to Switzerland in order to pursue his asylum proceedings. He arrived in Switzerland on 20 April 2002. During an interview with the BFF on 22 May 2002, he referred to a letter dated 10 February 2001 from the LTTE, stating that the Organization would “forgive” him one last time, as well as to a letter dated 17 January 2002 from the People's Liberation Organization of Tamil Eelam (PLOTE), threatening to arrest him without handing him over to the authorities. 2.10 On 25 September 2002, the BFF rejected the complainant’s second asylum application and ordered his expulsion. It challenged the credibility of his account and the authenticity of the letters allegedly sent by the LTTE and the PLOTE. His alleged arrests in 1995, 1998 and 2000 had no sufficient link in time to establish a present risk of persecution or ill-treatment. Even if his return to the North-East of Sri Lanka was too dangerous, the complainant had an internal flight alternative in the Southern parts of Sri Lanka. 2.11 On 28 October 2002, the BFF revoked its decision and held another interview with the complainant on 19 December 2002, during which he stated that he had not had any contact with the LTTE since his departure from Jaffna in 1994, and that the Organization had been looking for him since 1995. In February 2003, the BFF invited the complainant’s lawyer to comment on the information received from the German immigration authorities, and granted him access to the files of the German asylum proceedings. The lawyer did not comment. 2.12 On 15 May 2003, the BFF rejected the complainant’s second asylum application (dated 26 October 2001) and ordered his expulsion, on the following grounds: (a) the absence of any evidence that the complainant was ever detained, indicted or convicted for LTTE membership; (b) the fact that he was acquitted and released after relatively short detention periods; (c) the inconsistencies in his description of the dates and the periods of detention in his applications and in his statements at the Swiss Embassy in Colombo and before the BFF; (d) the context of his arrests, i.e. the Sri Lankan authorities’ need to investigate terrorist acts and to check the complainant’s status after his forcible return from three different countries;