{"id":77951,"date":"2018-06-01T16:27:52","date_gmt":"2018-06-01T23:27:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=77951"},"modified":"2018-06-01T16:27:52","modified_gmt":"2018-06-01T23:27:52","slug":"i-was-still-president-when-i-went-to-tangalle-in-helicopter-former-president-mahinda-rajapaksa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2018\/06\/01\/i-was-still-president-when-i-went-to-tangalle-in-helicopter-former-president-mahinda-rajapaksa\/","title":{"rendered":"I was still President when I went to Tangalle in helicopter: Former President Mahinda\u00a0Rajapaksa"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em><strong>Lahiru Pothmulla\u00a0Courtesy The Daily Mirror<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Responding to President Maithripala Sirisena\u2019s remarks that a certain individual has provided helicopters to former president Mahinda\u00a0Rajapaksa to fly to Tangalle as soon as the presidential election results were announced, Mr. Rajapaksa said he was still the President of the country when he left Colombo.<\/p>\n<p>As far as I am aware, I was still the President of the country when I left. I left Colombo even before the final election results were announced. The President of the country still functions, until a new President is sworn in. That\u2019s the true story. The Head of my security division was from Polonnaruwa. He also went there,\u201d he told journalists at an Iftar ceremony held at his residence last evening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lahiru Pothmulla\u00a0Courtesy The Daily Mirror Responding to President Maithripala Sirisena\u2019s remarks that a certain individual has provided helicopters to former president Mahinda\u00a0Rajapaksa to fly to Tangalle as soon as the presidential election results were announced, Mr. Rajapaksa said he was still the President of the country when he left Colombo. As far as I am [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77951\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}