Sri Lanka yesterday deployed thousands of troops and police to enforce a curfew after five people were killed in the worst violence in weeks of protests over an unprecedented economic crisis.
Nearly 200 were also wounded on Monday as Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned as prime minister, but that did little to calm public anger.
Rajapaksa had to be rescued in a pre-dawn operation by the military yesterday, after thousands of anti-government protesters stormed his official residence in Colombo overnight, with police firing tear gas and warning shots to keep back the crowd.
Photo: AP
“After a pre-dawn operation, the former PM and his family were evacuated to safety by the army,” a top security official said. “At least 10 petrol bombs were thrown into the compound.”
The Rajapaksa clan’s hold on power has been shaken by months of blackouts and shortages in Sri Lanka, the worst economic crisis since its independence in 1948.
However, Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa remains in office, with widespread powers and command over the security forces.
After weeks of overwhelmingly peaceful anti-government demonstrations, violence broke out on Monday when Mahinda Rajapaksa’s supporters — bused into the capital from the countryside — attacked protestors with sticks and clubs.
“We were hit, the media were hit, women and children were hit,” one witness said, asking not to be named.
Police fired tear gas and water cannons to disperse crowds and declared an immediate curfew in Colombo, a measure that was later widened to include the entire South Asian nation of 22 million people.
Authorities said that the curfew would be lifted this morning, with government and private offices, as well as shops and schools, ordered to remain shut yesterday.
US Ambassador to Sri Lanka Julie Chung wrote on Twitter that Washington condemned “the violence against peaceful protestors,” and called on the Sri Lankan “government to conduct a full investigation, including the arrest & prosecution of anyone who incited violence.”
Anti-government protesters defied police despite the curfew to retaliate against government supporters for the attacks late into Monday night.
Outside Colombo, Sri Lankan lawmaker Amarakeerthi Athukorala, of the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party, shot two people — killing a 27-year-old man — after being surrounded by a mob of anti-government protesters, police said.
“He then took his own life with his revolver,” a police official said.
Athukorala’s bodyguard was also found dead at the scene, police said.
Another ruling party politician who was not named opened fire on protesters, killing two and wounding five in the deep south of the island, police said.
Angry crowds set alight the homes of more than a dozen pro-Rajapaksa politicians, along with some vehicles, while buses and trucks used by the government loyalists in and around Colombo were also targeted.
Several Rajapaksa homes were torched in different parts of the country, while a family museum in their ancestral village was trashed.
Doctors at the main Colombo National Hospital intervened to rescue wounded government supporters, with soldiers breaking open locked gates to ferry in the wounded.
“They may be murderers, but for us they are patients who must be treated first,” a doctor shouted at a mob blocking the entrance to the emergency unit.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS