Sri Lanka’s president Ranil Wickremasinghe has appointed Lohan Ratwatte, an official who previously threatened to kill two Tamil political prisoners at gunpoint, as the State Minister for Plantation Industries and Mahaweli Development.
In September 2021 Ratwatte stormed into the Anuradhapura prison and forces Tamil political prisoners to kneel at gunpoint. The then prisons minister, who was inebriated at the time, questioned the Tamil political prisoners if they had killed any soldiers during the war. He went on to point his gun at the inmates accusing them of complaining to the UN, adding that the president Gotabaya Rajapaksa had empowered him to release or kill the inmates.
In 2022, the bodyguard of the former convict turned Sri Lankan minister, turned his pistol on a barking pet dog that approached the minister in Jaffna, killing the animal.
Ratwatte himself has a history of mass murder and irresponsible behaviour with firearms. He led the killing of ten unarmed Muslims during the 2001 general elections for which he was convicted and sentenced by the high court. He was later acquitted on flimsy grounds.
In late December 2020, he terrified hotel guests in Kandy by firing gunshots into the air, reportedly due to anger.
His latest appointment by Wickremesinghe has already drawn widespread outrage on social media.
As reminder, in 2021, when Lohan Ratwatte was prisons minister, he apparently made Tamil prisoners held under a draconian terrorism law kneel and threatened to shoot them. He went to another prison, armed with a pistol, demanding to inspect the gallows.https://t.co/3GWk4fGjMl https://t.co/Y1lugvxCXL
— meenakshi ganguly (@meeganguly) January 29, 2024
