A Sri Lankan court on Tuesday extended the custody of Shiranthi Rajapaksa, the wife of a former president, over allegations that her charity misused donations collected for a children’s hospital.
The Oct. 7 arrest of Ms. Rajapaksa, 73, by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption was the latest blow to a family that ruled this nation of 22 million for nearly two decades, Al Jazeera reported. The charity she leads, the Siriliya Saviya Foundation, is accused of misusing nearly 100 million rupees ($303,000) in donations meant to buy equipment for a children’s hospital in Colombo.
Investigators told the court that China had already donated an MRI scanner for the hospital, yet the foundation kept soliciting donations for one and misused the money. The commission said its inquiry found the funds were used to buy a house, which it would move to freeze.
Sagara Kariyawasam, the general secretary of the family’s party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, rejected the account. “It is untrue, and the money is safe in the frozen bank account of Siriliya Saviya,” he told Al Jazeera. On Monday Ms. Rajapaksa’s lawyers sought anticipatory bail on health grounds and were refused. On Tuesday the court ordered her held until Friday.
A month before his mother’s arrest, Namal Rajapaksa, 40, a member of parliament, was taken into custody on bribery charges, where he remains. He is being tried over an alleged $30,000 bribe in a government deal with Airbus to buy planes for the national airline, and he is under investigation over a $211,000 bribe that a foreign company is accused of paying to hasten a government land transfer. Both date to his father’s presidency.
Another son of the former president, Yoshitha, 38, faces a money-laundering investigation, and a nephew, Shasheendra, 50, is out on bail in a corruption case. The former president’s brother Basil faces an arrest warrant after failing to appear in court over properties allegedly bought with illicit money. He is believed to be in the United States, and last week the Financial Crimes Investigation Division seized a property of his in Matara, on the southern coast.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, the family’s 80-year-old patriarch, became prime minister in 2004 and president a year later, and many in the Sinhala Buddhist majority revere him for defeating the Tamil Tiger rebels, ending a 26-year civil war in 2009. Nearly 40,000 civilians died in the war’s final weeks, the United Nations estimates, spurring an international inquiry into alleged atrocities. In office the family borrowed nearly $7 billion from China for infrastructure projects, many of them mired in corruption. Mr. Rajapaksa lost a bid for a third term in 2015; his brother Gotabaya won the presidency in 2019, then fled in 2022 as an economic crisis drove hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets. In 2024 Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a 57-year-old Marxist, won the presidency promising to act against the family.
The cases reach beyond graft. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who is barred from leaving the country, faces accusations that the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings — attacks on three churches and three hotels that killed 279 people — were staged to lift him in that year’s election, which he formally entered two days after the attacks. Last week a court rejected his appeal to forestall his likely arrest in the investigation. In 2023, a whistleblower told Britain’s Channel 4 that a former intelligence chief, Suresh Salley, had met the alleged bombers as part of a plot to sway the vote; Mr. Salley was arrested in February under terror laws. Last month the High Court convicted 15 of the 24 Muslim men accused in the bombings, while relatives of many victims say the “masterminds” remain free.
Proof of a link between the family and the 2019 attacks would have a “devastating effect,” said Ramindu Perera, a researcher in international law at the European University Institute in Italy. “Such revelations are likely to further delegitimise the SLPP’s standing in Sri Lankan politics,” he said. The party holds three of the 225 seats in the national parliament.
Mr. Dissanayake, speaking at a rally on Sunday in Nikaweratiya, in the northwest, said the law now applied to everyone equally. “If anyone believes that the law will not reach them, we are now proving that there is no place where law cannot reach and no one is beyond its reach,” he said.
Mr. Kariyawasam sees it differently. “We don’t have any problem with thieves being punished after proving their wrongdoings,” he said. “But the government is taking people to custody without any court trials, and then tells the people that they punish thieves. This is purely a political witch-hunt.” Mr. Perera said the anticorruption mandate was what brought Mr. Dissanayake’s National People’s Power to power, and Gamini Viyangoda, a political analyst, agreed with him: “This is not a political witch-hunt, but implementing the rule of law.”