Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe ordered the early release of nearly 1,000 prisoners to mark the country’s main Buddhist holiday, a senior official said yesterday.
The pardons on Vesak Day, which commemorates the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment and death, applied only to those convicted of minor offences, Sri Lankan Acting Commissioner-General of Prisons Thushara Upuldeniya said.
“We released these inmates from 28 prisons across the country,” Upuldeniya said of the Friday evening releases. “There were 982 men and six women who walked free.”
Photo: REUTERS
The cash-strapped South Asian nation is holding official Vesak celebrations for the first time in five years.
Festivities were canceled in 2019 after extremists carried out Easter Sunday suicide bombings that claimed 279 lives at churches and hotels in the capital, Colombo.
Official events marking the holiday were then put on hold by the COVID-19 pandemic and last year’s economic crisis, the worst since independence from the UK in 1948.
The island defaulted on its US$46 billion foreign debt in April last year — one of a chain of events that led to the ouster of then-Sri Lankan president Gotabaya Rajapaksa — but secured a US$3 billion IMF bailout in March.
Sri Lanka has declared a week of celebrations to mark Vesak, which fell on Friday, the first full moon of May, and banned the sale of alcohol over the weekend.
The country’s jails are overcrowded. As of the start of this month, there were nearly 27,000 inmates in facilities designed to hold 11,000, official data showed.
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