Sri Lanka has initiated a plan to ban the burqa as an interrogation of suspects and other evidence are pointing to the involvement of a large number of women in the Easter Sunday attacks that killed at least 321 people and wounded nearly 500 others in the island nation, a media report said on Tuesday.
The government is planning to implement the move in consultation with the mosque authorities, the Daily Mirror reported quoting sources. “The government, he said (source), is planning to implement the move in consultation with the mosque authorities and on Monday several ministers had spoken to President Maithripala Sirisena on the matter,” the paper reported the source as saying.
It has been pointed out that burqa and niqab were never part of the traditional attire of Muslim women in Sri Lanka until the Gulf War in the early 1990s which saw extremist elements introducing the garb to Muslim women. Defence sources said that a number of women accomplices of incidents in Dematagoda escaped wearing burqas, the report said.
If Sri Lanka adopts the burqa ban, it would join the group of nations in Asia, Africa, and Europe that have done so in the interest of preventing terrorists from using the burqa to evade police or hide explosives.
Among the nations that have enacted a ban on the item are Chad, Cameroon, Gabon, Morocco, Austria, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Belgium, and Xinjiang, a Muslim-majority province in northwestern China, the report said.
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