Court demands arrest of military chief
COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s speaker on Friday summoned parliament to meet next week in defiance of the president as a constitutional crisis darkened with an MP saying he was offered millions of dollars and a minister’s post to defect to a rival camp.
With the Indian Ocean nation torn between rival prime ministers Ranil Wickremesinghe and Mahinda Rajapakse, speaker Karu Jayasuriya said he could no longer ignore demands for parliament to meet to end the week-old feud.
Amid growing international concern over the standoff, Jayasuriya convened parliament to meet next Wednesday.
President Maithripala Sirisena suspended parliament until November 16 after sacking Wickremesinghe as premier and replacing him with former authoritarian president Rajapakse.
Wickremesinghe has refused to accept the dismissal and remained bunkered at the prime minister’s official residence for the past week amid nearly daily twists in the saga.
Sirisena at first lifted the suspension, but with observers saying his candidate Rajapakse did not have enough support to win a parliamentary vote, the president’s party said late on Thursday that the assembly would remain shut.
“The speaker met a majority of MPS at a committee room today and promised he will open parliament on November 7,” Jayasuriya’s spokesman said.
Some 118 of the 225 lawmakers attended the meeting in a new sign that Sirisena would not win a vote on Rajapakse, whose decade as president up to 2015 was marked by the brutal end of the Tamil civil war COLOMBO: A Sri Lankan court on Friday ordered the arrest the country’s top military officer over the abduction and murder of 11 people during the Tamil civil war.
Colombo Fort magistrate Ranga Dissanayake reprimanded police investigators for failing to act on a previous order to detain Admiral Ravindra Wijegunaratne.
“The court ordered that the admiral be arrested before November 9,” a court official said. “If they fail, there should be action against the police officer handling the case.”
The order came amid a bitter power struggle between sacked prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and former president Mahinda Rajapakse, who was named to replace him.
Rajapakse was head of state from 2005 to 2015 when the decades-old Tamil separatist war was brutally crushed — although the timing of today’s ruling appeared to have no deliberate link with the current political crisis.
The magistrate wants police to arrest Wijegunaratne, the chief of the defence staff, for allegedly shielding a navy officer responsible for abductions and killings.
Police told the court the admiral had protected Chandana Prasad Hettiarachchi, a navy intelligence officer who is the main suspect in the killing of 11 men between 2008 and 2009. They are believed to have been murdered while being illegally held by the navy. Their bodies were never found, but Hettiarachchi was arrested in August. — AFP and corruption claims.
Wickremesinghe and his allies are confident they can prove a majority. But intense behind-the-scenes lobbying to tempt defectors surged into the open on Friday.
A senior member of Wickremesinghe’s United National Party, Range Bandara, said he was offered $2.8 million and a ministry to switch sides and would go to the antigraft commission.
“I have a phone recording of a former minister in the Rajapakse camp trying to approach me,” Bandara told reporters. “A broker offered me the $2.8 million and the ministry of law and order.”
Another Wickremesinghe loyalist, deputy minister Ranjan Ramanayake has already accused China of financing the defection of MPS to the Rajapakse-sirisena camp. China has strongly rejected the claims.
The Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC) party, which has seven lawmakers, said its members had also rejected offers to join the Sirisenarajapakse camp.
“There are dealers and brokers trying to buy over MPS both wholesale and retail,” SLMC leader Rauff Hakeem said. “This is a disgrace, an assault on the dignity of honourable members of parliament.”
Hakeem said only an early parliament meeting could end the horse trading.