Sri Lanka announced plans to ban the wearing of burkas and said it would close more than 1,000 Islamic schools known as madrassas, citing national security.

The country’s minister of public security Sarath Weerasekara said he signed a paper on Friday seeking the approval of the Cabinet of Ministers to ban burkas — outer garments that cover the body and face worn by some Muslim women.

“The burka has a direct impact on national security,” Mr Weerasekara told a ceremony at a Buddhist temple on Saturday, without elaborating.

“In our early days, we had a lot of Muslim friends, but Muslim women and girls never wore the burka,” Mr Weerasekara said, according to video footage sent by his ministry.

“It is a sign of religious extremism that came about recently.

“We will definitely ban it.”

The wearing of burkas was temporarily banned in 2019 after the Easter Sunday bomb attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka that killed more than 260 people.

Two local Muslim groups that had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group have been blamed for the attacks at six locations — two Roman Catholic churches, one Protestant church and three top hotels.

Mr Weerasekara also said the government will ban more than 1,000 madrassas, saying they are not registered with the authorities and do not follow the national education policy.

The decision to ban burkas and madrassas is the latest move affecting the Indian Ocean island nation’s minority Muslims.

Muslims make up about 9% of the 22 million people in Sri Lanka, where Buddhists account for more than 70% of the population.

Ethnic minority Tamils, who are mainly Hindus, comprise about 15% of the population.

Read more: Buddhist mobs target Sri Lanka’s Muslims despite state of emergency

Sri Lanka will begin giving permission for Muslims who die with Covid-19 to be buried, the prime minister said, following an outcry over a previous ban.

Mahinda Rajapaksa gave the assurance in response to a question in Parliament.

Sri Lanka has required the cremation of all people who die from Covid-19, saying the virus in human remains could contaminate underground water.

Muslims and non-Muslims have protested against the rule over the past year, calling it unscientific and insensitive of Muslim religious beliefs.

The United Nations and the United States have also raised concerns with the government.

The World Health Organisation and Sri Lankan doctors’ groups have said Covid-19 victims can either be buried or cremated.

Muslim lawmaker Rishard Bathiudeen said he is happy with Mr Rajapaksa’s assurance, but that the government should implement it by withdrawing the compulsory cremation rule.

“Many people have been cremated before and their families are living in great agony.

“I am happy that they showed some compassion even at this stage, but it has to be implemented soon because people are dying every day,” he said.

Sri Lanka is a predominantly Buddhist country where it is customary for Buddhists and Hindus, the second largest religious group, to cremate the dead.

Muslims make up about 7% of the country’s 22 million people.

Sri Lanka has reported 71,211 coronavirus cases, including 370 deaths.

Read more: Buddhist mobs target Sri Lanka’s Muslims despite the state of emergency

All religions and their leaders must own up to extremist activities within their faith and examine which of their traditional teachings enable followers to commit evil, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.

The Most Rev Justin Welby, the figurehead of the worldwide Anglican Church, told interfaith leaders in Sri Lanka that accepting responsibility is key rather than disavowing an extremist.

Mr Welby arrived in Sri Lanka on Thursday and first visited St Sebastian’s Church near the town of Negombo to pay homage to those killed in the Easter suicide bomb attacks blamed on extremist Muslim groups.

On Friday, he told religious leaders that discussion among faiths has become more difficult in the last 30-40 years and in every faith, including in Christianity, extremist attitudes have grown.

“It is the duty of every religious tradition, for its leaders, to resist extremism and to teach peaceful dialogue,” he said.

“So the first challenge to all of us is take responsibility.

“If a Christian does something evil, it is not for me to say ‘well they are not a real Christian’. I have to ask myself ‘what is within my faith tradition, our historic teaching, that makes it easy for them to do that?’

“The second challenge in dialogue is honesty. Dialogue is where we are honest, where we open the door of our heart and say it is this that frightens me about you or this that I disagree with you about.

“Whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, whatever faith, society calls us to account and I believe that God calls us to account at the end of time. Have you been builders of peace or builders of pain?”

In the Easter attacks, more than 260 people died in six co-ordinated bombings of churches and hotels.

Seven suicide bombers from two local Muslim extremist groups who had pledged allegiance to Islamic State carried out the attacks, which also left some 500 people injured.

Other suspects killed themselves by exploding bombs, some with their families, as police and military closed in.

Islamic clerics expressed outrage at the attacks and did not allow the suicide bombers and those who killed themselves to avoid capture to be buried in Islamic burial grounds, having declared that they do not belong to the Muslim faith. Their children were buried with Islamic rituals.

A Sri Lankan court on Wednesday handed a six-year jail term to a Buddhist monk accused of inciting violence against Muslims, holding him guilty of contempt just months after he was convicted of intimidating the wife of a missing journalist.

The monk, Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara, leads the hardline Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) or “Buddhist Power Force”, which government ministers and Muslims have accused of stirring up violence against Muslims and Christians, allegations he has denied.

The court sentenced him to six years’ rigorous imprisonment over a 2016 incident when Gnanasara interrupted a court hearing on the abduction of the journalist, Prageeth Eknaligoda, in which military intelligence officials were accused.

He shouted at the judge and lawyers because the military officials had not been given bail, and threatened Eknaligoda’s wife.

“The convict intentionally committed the offence to undermine the judiciary,” Preethi Padman Surasena, the president of the court of appeal, said in delivering Wednesday’s judgment, adding, “Found guilty of all charges beyond reasonable doubt.”

The monk was convicted on four counts of contempt of court, receiving terms of four years each on the first and the second counts, six years on the third and five for the fourth, all to run concurrently.

A BBS official told Reuters the group would appeal against Wednesday’s ruling.

“We feel there is an attempt by interested parties to have judicial process targeting Gnanasara, therefore, though we do not agree with the judgment, we accept the sentence, and we will appeal,” said Dilantha Vithanage, the group’s chief executive.

Gnanasara, who is being treated in hospital for an ailment, was not in court for the ruling. He has been on bail since filing an appeal against a conviction in a separate case on June 14.

In that case, he received two concurrent jail terms of six months, a fine of 1,500 rupees ($9.39), and a compensation payment of 50,000 rupees ($313) for having threatened the journalist’s wife, Sandhya Eknaligoda.

Since 2014, the monk has faced accusations in cases regarding anti-Muslim violence, hate speech, and defaming the Koran, the Muslim holy book.

That year Gnanasara signed a pact with Myanmar’s Ashin Wirathu, who once described himself as “the Burmese bin Laden”, in what the duo called a bid to counter regional conversion efforts by Islamists.

($1=159.7000 Sri Lankan rupees)

Sri Lanka shut down social messaging networks including Facebook on Wednesday to control violence targeted at the country’s minority Muslims, officials said, even after the imposition of emergency in the Buddhist-majority island.

Tension has been growing between the two communities in Sri Lanka over the past year, with some hardline Buddhist groups accusing Muslims of forcing people to convert to Islam and vandalising Buddhist archaeological sites.

Some Buddhist nationalists have also protested against the presence in Sri Lanka of Muslim Rohingya asylum seekers from mostly Buddhist Myanmar, where Buddhist nationalism has also been on the rise.

Police clamped an indefinite curfew in the central highlands district of Kandy where the violence has been centred since Sunday following the death of a Buddhist youth in an altercation with a group of Muslims.

Buddhist mobs attacked mosques and businesses belonging to Muslims overnight, residents told Reuters on Wednesday, even after President Maithripala Sirisena imposed emergency for seven days to control the violence.

Police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara said there had been “several incidents” throughout Tuesday night in the Kandy area, famous for its tea plantations.

“The police arrested seven people. Three police officers were injured from the incidents,” Gunasekara told Reuters. There was no information about how many civilians had been wounded, he said.

Some of the violence has been instigated over social media with postings appearing on Facebook threatening more attacks against Muslims, the government said.

On Wednesday, it said Facebook, Viber and Whatsapp would be blocked across the country for three days.

Sri Lanka is still healing from a 26-year civil war against Tamil separatists that ended in 2009, with reports of rights abuses on both sides. Muslims make up 9 percent of the 21 million population, the smallest minority after ethnic Tamils, most of whom are Hindus.

UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said he was alarmed by the recurring episodes of violence against ethnic and religious minorities in Sri Lanka and sought accountability.

“There should be no impunity, either for the incitement that led to the attacks, or the attacks themselves,” he said in a speech to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.

The U.S. State Department in a security alert warned of the possibility of further unrest in Kandy, famous for a temple said to contain the tooth of Buddha.

A government minister said the violence in Kandy had been whipped up by people from outside the area. “There is an organised conspiracy behind these incidents,” Sarath Amunugama, a senior minister, told reporters in Colombo.