Lanka MPs defy Prez on blast probe

Colombo: Sri Lanka’s Parliament on Tuesday defied President Maithripala Sirisena and resumed investigations into security lapses surrounding the Easter suicide bombings that killed 258 people, officials said, as a political crisis in the country deepened.

The Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) began hearing testimony from Muslim leaders who claimed they repeatedly alerted the authorities to dangerous radicalisation, a parliamentary official said.

In what appeared to be a tit-for-tat move, Sirisena did not call the routine weekly Cabinet meeting to discuss the day-to-day running of the administration. The Opposition Sri Lanka People’s Front said the standoff between the president and the Cabinet, controlled by Prime Mini-ster Ranil Wickrem-esinghe’s party, meant the government was at a standstill. “The current standoff effectively means that there is no government in Sri Lanka from today,” Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLPF) leader Gamini Lakshman Peiris told reporters in Colombo.

There was no immediate word either from the President or the prime minister on why the scheduled Cabinet meeting was not held. Sirisena had militantly opposed public questioning of military, police and intelligence officials, saying it would compromise national security. The PSC maintains that witnesses were free to give evidence in camera. President Siri-sena last week asked his coalition Cabinet to stop the hearings, which have already revealed senior officials directly under him had ignored repeated intelligence warnings.

Sirisena sacked his intelligence chief over the weekend after he told the hearing that the April 21 attacks could have been avoided if police had been allowed to arrest the ringleader as early as last year.

An Islamic State-insp-ired local jihadist group has been blamed for the suicide attacks against three churches and three luxury hotels. Among the dead were 45 foreign nationals, while nearly 500 people were injured.

One of the badly damaged churches, St. Anthony’s, was scheduled to reopen for regular services pm Wednesday, church officials said in a sign of normality returning to the tense capital.

Two of the luxury hotels which were attacked have reopened, while the Shangri-La was also due to reopen on Wednesday.

Since the attacks, the country has been under a state of emergency which gives sweeping powers to the police and security forces to arrest and detain suspects for long periods of time. Sirisena has insisted that as minister of defence and law and order he was unaware of precise intelligence warnings from India over the attacks. He sacked his defence ministry secretary, Hemasiri Fernando, and suspended police chief Pujith Jayasundara after blaming them for the security failure.