Police arrested 587 suspects during island-wide search operations conducted on Monday, having inspected 27,773 individuals over the 24-hour period.
Of those detained, 13 were directly identified as being involved in criminal activity, while 138 were wanted on open warrants, police said.
The operations also produced a large traffic enforcement tally. Police arrested 65 people for driving under the influence of alcohol and 114 for reckless driving, and took legal action against a further 4,521 for other traffic offences.
A rolling daily count
The figures are released as a rolling daily total from the sustained national crackdown on narcotics and organised crime, rather than the result of any single operation, and the numbers move from day to day.
Monday’s sweep was larger than Sunday’s, when police reported 461 arrests from 25,482 people searched. It is closer in scale to operations on August 6, which produced 508 arrests from 27,054 searches.
Ada Derana’s report did not give a breakdown of narcotics seized during the period, identify the police divisions involved, or name a quoting officer. No other verified newsroom had published the same daily figures at the time of writing.
Pressure on the prison system
The scale of the drive has become difficult to separate from conditions in Sri Lanka’s prisons, which have been the subject of repeated unrest in recent weeks.
At a meeting of the government’s anti-drug steering council last week, officials discussed the possibility of imposing the death penalty for drug offences and said amendments to narcotics and bail law were close to being gazetted.
Source: Ada Derana.
