A Sri Lankan government body has rejected a Right to Information request questioning why a news website was blocked in Sri Lanka.
Access to London-based news website lankaenews.com, which had been critical of the Sri Lankan government, was blocked from Sri Lanka last month.
Tamil-language media organisation Maattram submitted a Right to Information request asking whether the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka had indeed blocked access to the website and if so, why it had been blocked.
The regulatory commission responded this week with a denial of the request, saying the questions could not be answered for national security reasons.
When Maattram was submitting the request, TRCSL had initially attempted to reject it in its Tamil form, stating the commission only had the capacity to accept requests in Sinhala or English.