9 May 2019 10:06 pm
There is a hidden hand which wants to destabilise this country and destroy its economy, City Planning, Water Supply and Higher Education Minister Rauff Hakeem said at a media briefing today.
“We have to identify that hidden hand in order to prevent possible attacks in the future. After the terror attack, search operations have been conducted and that should not be unnecessarily sensationalised. We must differentiate between normal criminal activity and terrorist activity.
Having a panic situation is definitely not helpful in returning the country to normalcy,” he said. After search operations conducted by security officials, certain things had been discovered which may have been kept for self-defence purposes in any community.
If a search operation is done in the entire country, among all communities they would find a hundred times more than the items that have been found,” he said.
“Unfortunately, since these search operations are focused in areas where the Muslim community is living, those discoveries have been displayed in a manner so as to portray this community as a violent community waiting to create mayhem in the entire country, but it is far from the truth,” he said.
“It is important to leave it to the security authorities to properly differentiate between all these aspects and take forward their search operations in a very orderly manner”.
While speaking to the media, a representative of the Muslim Civil Society said a thousand mosques had been searched and swords were found from only three mosques.
Even President Maithripala Sirisena had allegedly claimed that every house has at least one sword as it’s a custom - especially for the protection of our female adolescents and for the protection of our lives. The President had briefed the IGP, that taking those swords into custody was not fair,” he added. (Chaturanga Samarawickrama)