The Sri Lankan president’s party won 22 out of 23 local councils in elections marred by a gunbattle that killed two people and wounded dozens, official results released on Sunday showed.
President Mahinda Rajapakse’s United People’s Freedom Alliance swept Saturday’s polls, but conceded the most prestigious Colombo Municipal Council to the opposition.
The fractured opposition faced a rout elsewhere, with Rajapakse’s party gaining huge majorities in provincial towns, according to results released by the department of elections.
Two factions within the ruling party fought a gunbattle minutes before polling closed on Saturday, leaving a presidential aide and his bodyguard dead and more than a dozen people seriously wounded, police said.
Saturday’s poll, in which 1.5 million people were eligible to vote, was seen by many as a mid-term test for Rajapakse, who won a second term for himself and his party in parliamentary elections last year.
Rajapakse has boosted his popularity and tightened his grip on power since government forces crushed Tamil Tiger rebels in May 2009 and declared an end to nearly four decades of ethnic unrest which had claimed up to 100,000 lives between 1972 and 2009.
