A Sri Lankan court jailed a politically influential, firebrand Buddhist monk on Thursday, sentencing him to prison for a second time for insulting Islam and inciting religious hatred in the island nation.
Galagodaatte Gnanasara was sentenced to nine months for his anti-Muslim remarks dating back to 2016. He had been previously jailed last year on a similar charge for disparaging Sri Lanka’s minority Muslims, who make up just over 10% of the country’s 22 million population. He had been out on bail while appealing the four-year sentence.
The monk is a close associate of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who appointed him as head of a panel in 2021 to reform Sri Lanka’s legal system in an effort to ensure religious harmony. At the time, opposition lawmaker Shanakiyan Rasamanickam described Gnanasara’s appointment as “the definition of irony.”
In 2018, Gnanasara was sentenced to six years for intimidating the wife of a missing cartoonist and contempt of court, but was freed after nine months when former president Maithripala Sirisena pardoned him.
Rajapaksa, his patron, was forced to step down following months of protests over the country’s unprecedented economic crisis in 2022, and Gnanasara once again fell from grace, facing prosecution.
