MP arrested over rebel remembrance
COLOMBO: Sri Lankan police on Thursday arrested a Tamil MP for commemorating a separatist rebel who died campaigning for the minority community, hours after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa called for reconciliation between ethnic groups.
Opposition legislator Selvarajah Kajendran was bundled into a police vehicle in the northern Jaffna peninsula, the heartland of the Tamils, despite protests from onlookers at a memorial for Tiger rebel Thileepan.
Video footage shared on social media showed Kajendran, 46, resisting arrest and eventually being forced into the car along with two of his aides at Nallur, 360 kilometres north of Colombo.
Nallur police confirmed that the Tamil National People’s Front MP had been detained at the memorial, which was held near a temple where Thileepan died in 1987 after staging a hunger strike.
There was no immediate comment from his party, but Sri Lanka’s main Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance (TNA), condemned the police’s actions.
“I condemn the arrest of Selvarajah Kajendran, MP in (Nallur) Jaffna today while exercising his right to #memorialisation,” TNA spokesman Abraham Sumanthiran said on Twitter.