A 45-year-old man was arrested in Vavuniya on Friday for possessing an assault rifle.

The man was allegedly caught with a type 56 assault rifle and ammunition when randomly stopped by police in Nedunkeni, Vavuniya.

The man was set to be produced before the Vavuniya magistrates judge.

Sri Lanka’s president Maithripala Sirisena has reassured the Joint Opposition that he will be seeking legal advice on removing Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe from office.

Mr Sirisena met with members of the Joint opposition at President’s House yesterday, as turmoil continues in Colombo over the future of the Sri Lankan government.

Joint opposition MP Kumara Welgama told reporters that Mr Sirisena that he “would consult the Attorney General and legal experts on the possibility of removing the Prime Minister”.

Tamil voters in the North-East last week, as Sri Lankan security forces look on.

Sri Lanka’s ruling parties and the Tamil National Alliance (TNA) have been “offering vacuous rhetoric on reconciliation instead of addressing the roots of the country’s political conflict”, writes J S Tissainayagam in the Asian Correspondent, leading to Sinhalese and Tamil voters to “distrust them as political actors”.

“The voters conveyed just this at the polls” during last week’s local government elections, he continued.

Sri Lanka’s embattled Prime Minister Ranil Wickrmesinghe told reporters on Friday that his government would be sending a delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, to brief them on progress in implementing a UN resolution on accountability.

“Geneva is on the performance up to date so you will have to judge on what has been done so far,” said Mr Wickremesinghe in Colombo.

The Sri Lankan prime minister said his government’s delegation would be meeting with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on March 21.

The UN High Commissioner is scheduled to deliver a report on Sri Lanka on the same day.

The Sri Lankan government co-sponsored a resolution which mandates a hybrid accountability mechanism for violations of international humanitarian law committed during the armed conflict. Despite this, several senior government figures, including the Sri Lankan president have spoken out against allowing foreign judges and prosecutors to participate in such a mechanism.

See more from Colombo Gazette here.

Sri Lankan soldiers who were injured and the families of those killed in action will be allocated more relief through the National Defence Fund Act, declared Sri Lanka’s Lands and Parliamentary Affairs Minister Gayantha Karunathillake.

Mr Karunathillake told a press conference yesterday that the act had been amended following a proposal by Sri Lanka’s President Maithripala Sirisena in his capacity as Defence Minister. 

See more from The Island here.

The international community is worried about the reform agenda in Sri Lanka, the ambassador to the European Union has said.

“The reform agenda: that’s the big worry that the international community has got,” Ambassador Tung-Lai Margue said in an interview yesterday, according to dailynews.lk.

“We understand that it has always been a shaky coalition, and obviously recent actions have shown that a lot of people are not happy.”

Despite mounting pressure since suffering a heavy local election defeat last week, Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister remained defiant, insisting he will stay on to complete his term.

Speaking at a press conference in Colombo, Ranil Wickremesinghe said he would continue as prime minister as per Sri Lanka’s constitution.

However, he added that the United National Party which he heads, will be restructured in light of their election defeat.

Sri Lanka’s Appeals Court ordered the Attorney General to present a review of an investigation into the 2012 Welikada Prison, in the coming weeks.

Several Sri Lankan military personnel were arrested in connection with the gang rape of a nurse in the south of the island.

A captain of the Sri Lanka Corps of Military Police was arrested on Wednesday by Narahenpita police, following the arrest of an army doctor and driver earlier in the week.

Read more on dailynews.lk.

^{Photograph: Sri Lankan troops prepare for deployment to Lebanon earllier this month.}

Several human rights organisations have written to the United Nations calling for the deployment of a Sri Lankan military commander implicated in war crimes as the head of a peacekeeping force to be halted.