Colombo:

Sri Lanka’s national carrier blamed a rat on Tuesday for grounding a plane for three days, triggering chaotic delays that were feared to scare away investors in the cash-strapped carrier. The stowaway rodent was spotted aboard a SriLankan Airlines Airbus A330 flight from the Pakistani city of Lahore on Thursday, triggering a search of the aircraft to ensure it had not chewed through critical components.

An airline official said the plane has now resumed flying, but the grounding has had a knock-on effect across flight schedules.

“The aircraft was grounded in Colombo for three days,” an airline official said on condition of anonymity. “The plane could not take off without determining the mouse’s whereabouts. It was found dead.”

The state-owned airline had accumulated losses of more than $1.8 billion as of March 2023 and three more of its 23 aircraft have been grounded for more than a year.

The airline did not have the foreign currency to pay for the mandatory engine overhaul.

Aviation Minister Nirmal Siripala de Silva told reporters the errant rodent could scare away “a handful of investors” interested in buying the debt-ridden airline.

Successive governments have tried to sell it without success. The previous administration offered the airline a dollar, but no one accepted it.

The International Monetary Fund last year provided Sri Lanka with a $2.9 billion loan over four years, stressing that such state-owned enterprises were a heavy burden on the national budget.

The airline was profitable until 2008, when it canceled its management agreement with Emirates amid a dispute with then-President Mahinda Rajapaksa.

The airline refused to provide seats to paying passengers and refused to give them up to 35 members of Rajapaksa’s family, who were returning from a holiday in London.

Ironically, one of the airline’s most profitable years was 2001, when the Tamil Tigers separatist movement destroyed several aircraft in an attack, and insurance payouts and the removal of excess capacity boosted the airline’s revenue .

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)