Media Secretary Charitha Herath Deletes His Tweets

une 24, 2014

Publicly illustrating the present mindset of many civil servants in Sri Lanka, Media Ministry Secretary Charitha Herath yesterday uploaded a controversial tweet that condoned the sentencing of three Al-Jazeera journalists in Egypt – a verdict that has been heavily criticized worldwide, even by the UN Human Rights Chief Navi Pillay.

Last afternoon Herath uploaded a tweet from his handle @charith9 that read:

#AlJazeera #journalists in Cairo sentenced to 7 years in jail. Reason was to help M/brotherhood. How many of that kind helped LTTE in #lka

However, few minutes later he deleted but it had already been recorded by Colombo Telegraph.

This tweet also seems rather ominous, seeing as the Rajapksa state-owned daily English newspaper’s Editor Rajpal Abeynayake in his editorials on Saturday and yesterday called for thearrests of journalists who updated the ground situation in Aluthgama and Beruwala in the wake of anti-Muslim clashes last week.

The three journalists Peter Greste, Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed were sentenced to seven years imprisonment today under charges of propagating false news and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. They were detained on 29 December 2013.