A plot to kill the president, links to foreign intelligence, a rogue police officer and a missing sniper: the snippets of news emerging from Sri Lanka in recent weeks seem plucked from the pages of paperback fiction.<\/p>\n
But the allegations have had real enough consequences for the island nation, contributing to upending its politics, undermining its currency and credit rating, and affecting relations with giant neighbour India.<\/p>\n
President Maithripala Sirisena sacked Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in October, just weeks after a little-known social activist alleged he had heard of a plot to assassinate the president from a police officer.<\/p>\n
Reuters has learned that investigators have not found any substantial evidence to back up the claim, although Sirisena said in a newspaper interview this month that the refusal of Wickremesinghe to take the plot seriously was the final straw leading to his dismissal.<\/p>\n
Wickremesinghe has said he never interfered with the investigations and kept Sirisena informed of their progress.<\/p>\n
Sri Lanka has a long history of political assassinations in decades of civil war, making Sirisena\u2019s allegations all the more explosive.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is hard to know what the truth is and many people are sceptical ,\u201d said a senior Western diplomat in Sri Lanka\u2019s capital Colombo. \u201cIt\u2019s part of the politics,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
What is clear is the drama has paralysed the island nation and left it without a functioning government for months.<\/p>\n
The alleged plot first came to light on September 12, when self-styled anti-corruption activist and police informant Namal Kumara gathered a few local journalists and made a series of accusations against a senior police officer.<\/p>\n
The most alarming of those claims was that the officer had told him about a plot to assassinate Sirisena using agents of the criminal underworld.<\/p>\n
Kumara said he had deleted the recording of the conversation about the plot against Sirisena out of fear, but to back up his allegations he released recordings of other conversations with the deputy inspector general of police, Nalaka de Silva.<\/p>\n
Ruwan Gunasekara, a police spokesman, said there was evidence in those recordings of a plot to kill another senior officer. But he added that in nearly three months of investigations, police had found \u201cno substantial evidence\u201d of an assassination threat to Sirisena beyond Kumara\u2019s claims.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A plot to kill the president, links to foreign intelligence, a rogue police officer and a missing sniper: the snippets of news emerging from Sri Lanka in recent weeks seem plucked from the pages of paperback fiction. But the allegations have had real enough consequences for the island nation, contributing to upending its politics, undermining […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":50015,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-50014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50014"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50016,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50014\/revisions\/50016"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}