The Sri Lankan Parliament Speaker accepts the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and says the latter has legally resigned.
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Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa (archive).
Sri Lanka’s Parliament Speaker, Mahinda Yapa Abhiwardana, has accepted the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa after escaping To the outside, after demonstrators stormed his residence last week.
“Gotabaya has legally resigned,” Abiwardana told reporters on Friday.
Sri Lanka’s President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, sent a letter of resignation by email to the speaker of the country’s parliament on Thursday evening. On Thursday, the fugitive president left the Maldives for Singapore.
After his departure, the demonstrators in Sri Lanka decided to evacuate the official buildings they had stormed, especially the house of President Rajapaksa.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore, for its part, said that it had allowed Rajapaksa to enter its territory on a private visit. She added that he did not ask for asylum and she did not grant him asylum.
Rajapaksa fled his residence on Saturday after protesters stormed his house, blaming him for his mismanagement at a time when the country is going through the most serious economic crisis in its history. On Wednesday, he managed to escape from Colombo to the Maldives.
The Maldivian press reported that the President of Sri Lanka was mocked and insulted while leaving Velana Airport, while a protest was held in the capital, Male, to demand the Maldivian government not to allow him to leave safely.
And the media in the Maldives confirmed that the Sri Lankan president spent his night at the luxurious Waldorf Astoria Itafushi hotel.
According to diplomatic sources, the United States rejected Rajapaksa’s visa application, because he had renounced his US citizenship in 2019 before running for president in Sri Lanka.
The protesters announced The Sri Lankan government and those who broke into President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s home last weekend, are to leave the presidential buildings they broke into.
“We will withdraw peacefully from the presidential palace, the presidential secretariat and the prime minister’s office immediately, but we will continue our struggle,” a spokeswoman for the protesters said.
On Wednesday, thousands of anti-government protesters in Colombo stormed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s office, defying a declared state of emergency and tear gas and water cannons used by police after President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled to the Maldives.
The country’s economy collapsed As a result of a crisis caused by the “Covid-19” pandemic, which, among its consequences, undermined the main tourism sector in Sri Lanka, which led to the inability of the state, which is experiencing unprecedented inflation, to finance imports of basic products, which caused a shortage of rice and milk. sugar, flour and medicine.