PM discloses conspiracies against President

In a five-page statement he issued this week on the upcoming August 5 parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa gave an insight into events that occurred soon after Pre s i d e n t Gotabaya Rajapaksa was voted to office.

This is what he said about one such instance: "Within days of the President taking o f f i c e, there was the well-publicised drama alleging that an employee of a Western embassy had been abducted, harassed and questioned. Reports about this first appeared in the foreign media. The Sri Lankan people got to know about it only later. All this was designed to create a certain impression about the new dispensation in the minds of Sri Lankans and foreigners. But the President adroitly defeated these conspiracies. Investigations showed the Sri Lankan people and the world that the story about the abduction of a Western embassy employee was a total fabrication.”

Another instance, Premier Rajapaksa said was: “Within the first two or three days after the new President took office, we noticed odd stories appearing in the media. One news story said that pedestrians crossing the road without using marked pedestrian crossings would be fined by the police. Another story said that Colombo beggars would be rounded up and sent off to camps and that those begging on trains would be arrested. These were false reports. The new dispensation that had just assumed power did not have the time to discuss such low- priority matters. What the conspirators expected from such propaganda was to put it into the minds of the people in a subtle way, that an authoritarian President had come into power and the people would have to obey the rules to the letter.”