Sri Lanka's security authorities are searching for 30,000 army deserters nearly five years after ending a decades-long separatist war with Tamil Tiger guerrillas, the military said Saturday.

Police across the country have been told to track down deserters who failed to accept several offers of leniency, military spokesman Ruwan Wanigasooriya said.

Forensic experts have discovered more bodies in an unmarked mass grave in Sri Lanka's former war zone, raising the total to 36, an official said Friday.

A team led by judicial medical officer Dhananjaya Waidyaratne found four more skeletons Thursday in the first mass grave uncovered since troops defeated Tamil rebels nearly five years ago.

A Sri Lankan man wanted on an international arrest warrant for terrorism, was discovered in France by accident, after he walked into a police station to complain about poor working conditions.

Jeyanthan Tharmalingam, 35, went last Thursday to give a statement in a case about illegal employment in which he was a victim, at a police station in the eastern suburbs of Paris, judicial sources said.

The United States called Sunday for Sri Lanka to investigate rights abuses by security forces after a top envoy completed a fact-finding mission to the island, the U.S. embassy in Colombo said.

U.S. State Department war crimes investigator Stephen Rapp "listened to eyewitness accounts about serious human rights abuses" during his five-day mission to the island that ended on Saturday, the embassy said.

Sri Lanka on Sunday called snap local elections seen as a gauge of President Mahinda Rajapakse's popularity ahead of national polls expected to be held later this year, officials said.

The southern and western provincial councils, the highest level of local government, have been dissolved, clearing the way for local elections almost a year before they were due, officials said.

Sri Lanka said Friday it would protest to the United States over its allegations that army shelling killed hundreds of families during the final days of the island's ethnic civil war.

A senior foreign ministry official said the allegation, made in a U.S. embassy tweet Thursday, would be discussed with visiting Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice Stephen Rapp.

A senior U.S. official investigating war crimes has visited a former Sri Lankan battleground where hundreds of families were killed in army shelling, the U.S. embassy said Thursday.

U.S. Ambassador for Global Criminal Justice Stephen Rapp on Wednesday traveled to the northern province where troops defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels in May 2009, the embassy in Colombo said.

Sri Lanka said Tuesday it had raised $1 billion through a sovereign bond issue despite a warning by the International Monetary Fund against increasing its foreign borrowing.

The central bank said the five-year bond, offering an annual six percent yield, was more than three times oversubscribed within hours of opening Monday.

A Canadian lawmaker said Thursday she was intimidated and warned she could be deported during an ongoing visit to her birthplace of Jaffna, the war-battered Tamil heartland of Sri Lanka.

Rathika Sitsabaiesan, an ethnic Tamil, was subjected to "political intimidation" and warned of possible arrest and deportation, according to a statement on her New Democratic Party's (NDP) website.

Sri Lanka on Saturday deported an Indian journalist arrested on a charge of working in the island's former war zone without media credentials, police said.

The 24-year-old, who was working for a magazine based in the Indian city of Chennai, was arrested on Christmas Day for photographing military installations in Sri Lanka's north, police spokesman Ajith Rohana said.