The President of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe has officially granted an amnesty to more than 1,000 convicts and released them from jails across the country to mark Christmas, a prisons official confirmed on Tuesday morning.
According to Prison Commissioner Gamini Dissanayake, 1,004 Sri Lankans who had been imprisoned for failing to pay unpaid fines were released on Monday.
A comparable number of prisoners were released in May to commemorate Vesak, a celebration honouring the Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death, in Sri Lanka, a country where Buddhism predominates.
The latest pardon came after police arrested nearly 15,000 people during a weeklong military-backed anti-narcotics drive that was halted on the eve of Christmas.
A police statement said 13,666 suspects were arrested while nearly 1,100 addicts were detained and sent for compulsory rehabilitation at a military-run facility.
The island nation’s jails are chronically overcrowded.
As of Friday, there were nearly 30,000 inmates in facilities designed to hold 11,000, according to official data.
In another report, Sri Lanka has concluded plans to award a multi-billion dollar oil refinery project to a Chinese state-owned company after a rival bidder pulled out, the energy minister confirmed on Wednesday.
According to Kanchana Wijesekera, asserted that the government would shortly enter into an investment agreement with Sinopec to build the refinery next to the Chinese-run port at the southern town of Hambantota.
‘There were only two bidders shortlisted and Vitol pulled out. That leaves only Sinopec and we will finalise an agreement with them in a couple of weeks,’ Wijesekera told reporters in Colombo.
Africa Today News, New York gathered that Sri Lanka had originally awarded the project, which has an estimated cost of $3.85 billion, to an Indian family-owned company based in Singapore in 2019.