Gunmen fire at buses carrying minority voters in Sri Lanka
Colombo, Sri Lanka - Gunmen fired at buses carrying minority Muslim voters on Saturday as Sri Lankans elected a new president, with the powerful Rajapaksa clan eyeing a comeback seven months after the island was hit by extremist attacks.
Minority Tamils and Muslims are seen as crucial in the close election, and Saturday’s attack in the northwest of the island - in which no one was injured - was likely aimed at deterring people from voting.
The assailants blocked the road with burning tyres and other makeshift barriers as more than 100 buses carrying people to their home district to vote were approaching. They opened fire at two vehicles in the convoy and pelted with stones as well, police said.
In the Tamil-dominated northern peninsula of Jaffna, police arrested ten men suspected of ‘trying to create trouble’, police said, while complaining that the army had illegally set up roadblocks that could stop people getting to polling stations.
Such tactics are nothing new in Sri Lanka, which emerged from a horrific civil war only a decade ago. At the 2015 election, there was a series of explosions in the region that activists said were aimed at reducing turnout.
This time, there were long queues outside polling stations even before voting began.
Supporters from rival parties meanwhile clashed in a tea plantation area 90km east of the capital Colombo, with two people taken to hospital with knife wounds, the election commission said.
Some 85,000 policemen were on duty for the election with a record 35 candidates running for president, an office with considerable power similar to the French political system, with close to 16mn eligible voters.
Results could come as early as midday on Sunday.
One of the two frontrunners is grey-haired retired army lieutenant colonel Gotabaya Rajapaksa (70), almost five years after his charismatic but controversial elder brother Mahinda Rajapaksa lost power after a decade as president.
Dubbed the ‘Terminator’ by his own family, ‘Gota’ is promising an infrastructure blitz and better security in the wake of the extremists’ attacks in April that killed 269 people.
“Gotabaya will protect our country,” construction worker
Wasantha Samarajjeew (51) said as he cast his ballot in Colombo.
He main rival is Sajith Premadasa (52) from the governing liberal United National Party (UNP), son of assassinated expresident Ranasinghe Premadasa.
He is also pushing development and security but also free sanitary pads for poor women, earning him the nickname ‘Padman’ after a famous Bollywood movie.
The Rajapaksas are adored by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority for defeating the Tamil Tigers and ending a 37 year civil war in 2009 in which around 100,000 people lost their lives.
Police arrested ten men suspected of ‘trying to create trouble’ in Tamil-dominated Jaffna