By Ranga Sirilal

COLOMBO, Aug 29 (Reuters) - Sri Lanka is to probe allegations that members of the state security forces helped abduct children as fighters for a band of renegade rebels seen allied to the government, the island's human rights ministry said on Wednesday.

The move comes as President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government faces international pressure to halt rights abuses blamed on elements of the military, paramilitaries and separatist Tamil Tiger rebels -- and just weeks before the United Nations Commission on Human Rights meets in Geneva.

The new "Committee to inquire into allegations of abduction and recruitment of children for use in armed conflict" also comes seven months after the government told the UN it would pave the way for a credible investigation into the allegations, made by rights groups and U.N. envoy Allan Rock.

Rock said last year there was credible evidence that elements within the security forces had helped to abduct children as soldiers for a former band of Tamil Tiger rebels who broke away from the mainstream group in 2004 and are now called the Karuna faction.

The government angrily rejected the allegations at the time.

"All these are allegations and we are willing to look into the allegations," Mahinda Samarasinghe, Minister of Disaster Management and Human Rights, told Reuters.

The government has repeatedly denied state involvement in rights abuses, including the high profile murder of 17 local aid workers in August 2006 that Nordic truce monitors have pinned on the security forces. A presidential commission is probing that case.

The government has rejected calls for a United Nations rights monitoring mission in a land counted among the most dangerous in the world for aid and media workers given the numbers killed over the past two years.

UNICEF says the Karuna group, like the Tigers, continues to recruit children into its ranks and analysts say the group has been helping the government to battle their former Tiger comrades.

An estimated 5,000 people have been killed since last year amid a new chapter in the island's two-decade civil war, while reports of abductions and extrajudicial killings are widespread.

Analysts see no clear winner on the horizon, and fear a war that has killed nearly 70,000 people since 1983 could grind on for years.

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