Colombo, Sep 2 (TIWN) Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka's former President who fled the country after anti-government protesters stormed his official residence on July 13, will return to the crisis-hit island nation on Saturday.

Rajapaksa is now in in Thailand, The Island newspaper reported.  The former President, who oversaw the decimation of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, first flew to The Maldives and then to Singapore, where he remained for a while before moving on to Thailand.  He fled Sri Lanka on July 9 after tens of thousands of demonstrators, mostly the young, stormed and took over the President's House and other landmark government buildings as mass anger exploded on the streets against the country's worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.  Gotabaya Rajapaksa's influential brothers -- Mahinda Rajapaksa, a former President and a former Prime Minister, and Basil Rajapaksa, a former Minister -- remain in Sri Lanka and have been barred from leaving the country by a court.