Leader of the House Bimal Rathnayake alleged in Parliament today that a climate of extremism was deliberately cultivated to facilitate the return of the Rajapaksa regime, which lost power in 2015.
The Minister was speaking during the adjournment debate on the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks.
“The Easter Sunday attack cannot be taken as an isolated incident. There was a need to create a situation for the Rajapaksas to return. On one hand, they attempted this by creating a political rift between President Maithripala Sirisena and Premier Ranil Wickremesinghe. They weakened the government, but it was not sufficient as the 2015 mandate was very strong,” he said.
He claimed that what he termed an “objective situation” was engineered beginning in 2013, with the involvement of intelligence agencies.
“The Rajapaksas created an objective situation. They started this in 2013 by creating and maintaining Sinhala and Muslim extremist groups through intelligence agencies. The culmination of this was similar to the Cambridge Analytica incident,” Rathnayake said. (Newswire)