An international human rights group has formally asked Singapore to indict Sri Lanka’s deposed president Gotabaya Rajapaksa for crimes against humanity during his country’s decades-long civil war, officials said Monday, IgbereTV reports
Rajapaksa fled his country earlier this month after his official residence was stormed by tens of thousands of protesters infuriated by the island nation’s painful economic crisis.
He later escaped to the Maldives in a military plane and travelled on to Singapore, from where he tendered his resignation.
Rajapaksa helmed Sri Lanka’s defence ministry while his brother Mahinda was president and was in charge when the country’s brutal Tamil separatist conflict came to a bloody end in 2009.
Rights groups accused government forces of killing 40,000 Tamil civilians in a no-holds-barred offensive during the war’s final weeks.
The South Africa-based International Truth and Justice Project said it had urged Singapore to exercise its universal jurisdiction to arrest the former president for grave breaches of international humanitarian law
