Hundreds protest against using Mattala airport to store paddy

Hundreds of protestors gathered in Mattala to protest after the town’s international airport was put in to use to store paddy earlier this week.

As many as 500 people came together in Hambantota, the home town of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, with whom the airport shares a name to protest for the second time this week.

The Mattala Rajapaksa International airport is currently only used by a single carrier, Fly Dubai, which operates one flight into the airport. Officials announced that from this week onwards, the airport would be put to use and paddy would be stored there.

Construction of the airport began in 2009 and was completed in 2013, under former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, and was largely financed through Chinese state loans. Since its opening it has remained largely under utilised.

See our earlier post:

Hambantota international airport put to use (02 Sep 2015)

Add new comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and email addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Global and entity tokens are replaced with their values. Browse available tokens.