VIEW HERE: In the early hours of Wednesday morning, just before he was expected to resign amid mass protests fueled by a crippling economic crisis, embattled President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country on a military jet from Colombo, bound for the nearby Maldives.
Now the protesting masses have breached the prime minister’s office as well, with the army appearing to stand down, days after storming the president’s residence and essentially living there, including swimming in his pool – as now viral video showed – demanding that he must go. “President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his wife left aboard an air force plane bound for the Maldives — and he made his prime minister the acting president in his absence. That appeared to only further roil passions in the island nation,” the AP reports.