Rioters in Sri Lanka who stormed President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s residence on Saturday uncovered there “millions of rupees,” the local Daily Mirror newspaper reported on Sunday.
According to the article, the protesters reportedly “recovered a large sum of money inside the mansion.” Videos are posted on social networks of the rioters counting the unearthed currency notes. It is reported that “the recovered money was handed over to the security units.”
On Saturday, the protesters took over the residence of Sri Lanka’s president. They swam in his swimming pool, ate at his kitchen and stayed at his rooms. Videos of this were widely shared on the Internet.
On Saturday, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Colombo, demanding the resignation of Rajapaksa. More than 40 people were injured in the protests. They also stormed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s residence which they later set on fire.
The protests sparked by financial and economic crises have engulfed the country since early April. As Wickremesinghe told TASS in an exclusive interview, Sri Lanka is hit hard by the worst crisis in modern history, and the island nation’s politicians cannot yet find parallels to such a crisis in this century or in the last century or the century before. According to the prime minister, the country is currently in the middle of the crisis.
Wickremesinghe pointed out that Sri Lanka was facing severe shortages of foreign currencies, fuel and petroleum products, fertilizers, food for some groups of the population, and medicines. According to his estimates, it will take three years or even more to recover from the economic crisis.