COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa has said that Islamic terrorism poses a threat to the country and ‘careful monitoring’ is needed.

In a paper published in the latest issue of the US Defence Department’s journal “Prism”, Gotabaya Raja­paksa said that since the defeat of the LTTE in 2009 some of the Muslim groups in Lanka had started activities that go “far beyond self-protection”.

“There is information that some of these groups have even tried to link up with global Islamic terrorist organisations. This is a situation that requires careful monitoring,” Gotabaya said in the journal brought out by the Centre for Complex Operations (CCO).

“Some Islamic groups in Lanka have started to establish ties with LTTE- linked agents to create further problems in the island nation,” he charged, stating that the increasing insularity of Lanka’s ethnic groups is at the root of the problem.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2014