Sri Lanka jails firebrand Buddhist monk for Muslim insults

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By Editor_1
Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Ven. Gnanasara Thera at a magistrates' court following an arrest warrant for his alleged hate crime against Muslims in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in June 2017 -AFP/File

COLOMBO – A Sri Lankan court on Thursday (28) sentenced an influential Buddhist monk to four years’ hard labour for fanning sectarian hatred against the island’s minority Muslim population.

A Sri The Colombo High Court found that Galagodaatte Gnanasara Thera, who is also General Secretary of the Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), had hurt Muslims by making disparaging remarks about Islam at a 2016 press conference.

“The monk was sentenced to four years of hard labour and fined 100,000 rupees ($330),” a court official said. “He was sent to prison to start serving his sentence.”

Gnanasara Thera has been accused of instigating violence against Muslims in the Buddhist-majority country, where roughly 10% of the 22 million people follow Islam.

In 2012, he was at the forefront of an anti-Muslim campaign which called on the majority Sinhalese to boycott Muslim-owned businesses.

The United States in 2014 cancelled a visa issued to the Gnanasara Thera, while social media platform Facebook blocked his account after the BBS’s alleged involvement in violence against Sri Lanka’s minority Muslims in the Western coastal town of Aluthgama.

He has close ties with Wirathu, an extremist monk based in Myanmar.

This is not the first time Gnanasara, who once enjoyed powerful political ties, has been in jail.

In 2018, he was sentenced to six years for intimidating the wife of a missing cartoonist and contempt of court. But he was freed nine months later after former president Maithripala Sirisena pardoned him.

Ex-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa later made Gnanasara Thera the head of a panel to recommend legal reforms to ensure religious harmony.

At the time, opposition lawmaker Shanakiyan Rasamanickam described Gnanasara’s committee as “the definition of irony”.

– AFP/EN

 

 

Editor_1
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