A Sri Lankan court sentenced 12 men to death on Wednesday for the 2022 mob killing of a lawmaker during protests that toppled the president of the South Asian nation.
Lawmaker Amarakeerthi Athukorala, 57, was lynched after he had opened fire on people blocking his car in the town of Nittambuwa, outside the capital Colombo, investigators told the court.
Athukorala was overwhelmed by a mob and tried to take refuge in a building, but was surrounded by about 5,000 people, some of whom carried out the lynching. His bodyguard was also lynched.
The killing came amid nationwide protests in May 2022 against severe shortages of food, fuel and medicines as the country ran out of foreign exchange to finance even the most essential imports.
In a majority decision on Wednesday, a three-judge bench of the Gampaha High Court convicted 12 men while freeing another 23 suspects in Athukorala’s case.
The verdict can be appealed to the Supreme Court.
Sri Lanka has not carried out capital punishment since 1976, although courts regularly sentence convicts to death by hanging for grave crimes.
During the 2022 protests, some 75 homes of government legislators were torched after loyalists of then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa tried to violently break up a peaceful demonstration in Colombo.
The president and his prime minister brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, both resigned.
The protests had erupted after the government defaulted on its $46 billion external debt in April 2022, but Rajapaksa’s successor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, negotiated a bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund in early 2023.
However, Wickremesinghe lost the September 2024 presidential election to leftist Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who has since stabilised the economy while maintaining the austerity measures of his predecessor.
