Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa expressed discomfiture at seeing former President’s Secretary Lalith Weeratunga and former Telecommunications Regulatory Commission (TRC) Director General Anusha Palpita jailed.

“It was very sad to see,” the former President said. “I am very sorrowful about this.”

He said Weeratunga and Palpita had acted on his commands, but denied they had done anything wrong.

“I am the one who told them to distribute ‘sil redi’,” he said. “They were acting on my orders.”

The former President said the jailing of the two men was nothing short of political revenge.

“We never resorted to political revenge,” he told a crowd of supporters, “We also could have but we never did.”