COLOMBO—Sri Lanka will ban the wearing of the burqa and shut more than a thousand Islamic schools, a government minister said on Saturday. Minister for public security, Sarath Weerasekera, said the new policy was based on considerations for “national security” during a news conference on Friday. “In our early days, Muslim women and girls never wore the burqa,” he said. “It is a sign of religious extremism that came about recently. We are definitely going to ban it.” The wearing of the burqa in Sri Lanka was temporarily banned in 2019 after the bombing of churches and hotels by Islamic terrorists that killed more than 250. Later that year, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, best known for crushing a decades-long insurgency by the Marxist militant group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in the north of the country as defence secretary, was elected president after promising a crackdown on extremism. Both Tamil leaders and …
COLOMBO—Sri Lanka will ban the wearing of the burqa and shut more than a thousand Islamic schools, a government minister said on Saturday. Minister for public security, Sarath Weerasekera, said the new policy was based on considerations for “national security” during a news conference on Friday. “In our early days, Muslim women and girls never
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