By Zacki Jabbar
The UNP on Wednesday accused the government of using a recent picture of UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe meeting some members of the UK UNP branch in London, to allege that they were LTTE’ers.
General Secretary of the UNP Tissa Attanayake MP said that the four persons in the photograph with Wickremesinghe were Harsha Kannangara, Roshan Samantha, Dharsahan Daniel and Indika Kumara, all office bearers of the UNP UK branch.
The Rajapaksa regime was so bankrupt that it was disseminating blatant lies to shore up its dwindling vote base in the run up to the Presidential Election, he noted.
The MP pointed out that it was the UPFA government that had helped the LTTE by not challenging its appeal against a 2006 European Union(EU) ban on it, which was overturned by the EU General Court, 13 days ago.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa had boasted that no “elephant” could defeat his government. If the President was so confident, why was he resorting to such cheap tactics by unfairly tarnishing the reputation of innocent people, Attanayake queried.
The people knew very well that the so called budget relief was aimed at hoodwinking them once again at the next Presidential poll, he said adding that successive budgets over the last ten years had reduced the prices of goods and services marginally, only to be jacked up through midnight gazettes shortly thereafter, resulting in the cost of living zooming to unbearable levels.
The MP stressed that a strong joint opposition front, which was in the making would be able to end the Rajapaksa dictatorship, abolish the all powerful executive presidency and restore democracy, good governance and the rule of law.