Govt. should instruct authorities to take actions on national security - Mahinda

Leader of Opposition Mahinda Rajapaksa says instructing officials on the manner in which they should conduct themselves in relation to matters involving national security is the task of the government.

He stated this addressing the special parliamentary session convened this afternoon (23).

“After we ended the 30-year war on 19 May 2009, we all thought we had seen the last of such attacks,” the Opposition Leader stated.

The 10th anniversary of the ending of terrorism was to be marked next month and even during that 30-year war, no single attack carried out by the terrorists targeting civilians ever resulted in as much carnage as the Easter Sunday attacks, he said.

Stating that the LTTE also carried out co-ordinated simultaneous attacks on multiple targets but even they were not able to wreak the same amount of destruction, the Opposition Leader stated the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka is said to be the biggest single terrorist attack targeting civilians ever to take place in South Asia. So many people did not lose their lives even in the Mumbai attacks of 2008, he added.

The House has to look into the circumstances that enabled terrorism to once again raise its head in this country with such virulence, the Opposition Leader emphasized.

The people have no use for a government that cannot assure them of the safety of their lives, he added.

“In January 2015, I handed over a completely secure and peaceful country to the new President. We had strengthened the intelligence services so that there would be absolutely no threat to the national security of the country.

Our intelligence services worked closely with other intelligence services of neighbouring countries and other international intelligence services to ensure the security of the country,” he said addressing the Chamber.

“If I had known that there was an imminent threat of this nature, I would have immediately informed His Eminence Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith and also curtailed my own movements,” he further said.