Two young men were killed in a road accident on Sunday afternoon at Thoppur–Jinnanagar, an area known locally as the 59th Post, within the Muttur police division in the Trincomalee district.
Muttur police said the motorcycle the two were travelling on collided head-on with a tipper truck on the Trincomalee–Batticaloa main road.
The dead were named as Thamil Selvan Thanes, 21, and Arunavan Selvaretnam, both residents of Kilivetti in Muttur. One of the two was a university student. The other had completed arrangements to leave shortly for France, according to Hiru News.
The driver of the tipper truck presented himself at the Muttur police station after the collision and surrendered.
The bodies of both men are being held at the Muttur Hospital mortuary. Muttur police are conducting further investigations into the accident.
Police confirmed the deaths in a national road-accident summary issued on Monday, placing the collision near the 97th kilometre post on the Trincomalee–Batticaloa road and giving the victims’ ages as 19 and 22, NewsFirst reported. Hiru News named one of the two as 21. The same police summary recorded three deaths and 19 injuries in road accidents around the country.
Road deaths on the eastern corridor
The Trincomalee–Batticaloa main road is the principal coastal route linking the two eastern districts and carries a mix of heavy construction traffic and two-wheelers. Collisions between motorcycles and tipper trucks recur on Sri Lanka’s arterial roads: a three-wheeler and tipper collided fatally at Punanai on the same eastern corridor in June, and a police sergeant was killed in a tipper collision in Vavuniya in July.
