Colombo:

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe has granted an amnesty to over 1,000 convicts and released them from jails across the country to mark Christmas. Prison Commissioner Gamini Dissanayake said about 1,004 Sri Lankans who had been imprisoned for failing to pay unpaid fines were released on Monday.

The most recent pardon was granted following around 15,000 arrests made by police during a week-long anti-drug campaign supported by the military that was called off on Christmas Eve. According to a police statement, 13,666 suspects were taken into custody and roughly 1,100 addicts were placed in a military-run facility for mandatory rehabilitation.

The island nation's jails are often overcrowded. As of Friday, there were around 30,000 prisoners housed in facilities built to accommodate 11,000 prisoners. In Sri Lanka, where Buddhism predominates, it is customary to free convicts on important religious holidays. To mark Vesak, a Buddhist event honoring the birth, enlightenment, and death of the Buddha, a comparable number of prisoners were pardoned in May. The British constructed the majority of Sri Lanka's prisons around a century ago when the country's population was only three million.