A 31-year-old woman has been arrested at Rathmalana Beach in possession of 120,000 millilitres of illicit liquor valued at approximately Rs. 1.6 million, police said.
Officers of the Mount Lavinia Divisional Crime Investigation Bureau made the arrest under the direct supervision and direction of the unit’s Officer-in-Charge, Ada Derana reported on Tuesday.
The suspect is a resident of Perera Mawatha in the Koralawella area of Moratuwa. She was handed over to the Mount Lavinia Police Station after the arrest and is due to be produced before the Mount Lavinia Magistrate’s Court.
A large haul by recent standards
At 120 litres, the seizure is among the larger single-suspect hauls reported in the Colombo District this month, and close to twice the volume recovered in comparable recent cases along the western coast.
Police arrested a 51-year-old woman in Wennappuwa on Saturday with 67.5 litres packed into 90 bottles, and a 53-year-old man from Ja-Ela was detained earlier this month with 200 bottles in the Muthurajawela marshland at Mahabage. Production sites have also been targeted: two men were held in August after a raid on an illicit liquor plant near the Karadiyana dump, where officers recovered 135 litres of finished liquor and about 16,000 litres of fermented wash.
Rathmalana and Koralawella sit on the coastal strip immediately south of Colombo, within the Mount Lavinia police division.
Ada Derana did not say whether the liquor was distilled locally or brought in from elsewhere, whether the woman is alleged to have been transporting or selling it, or how officers came to be at the beach. No court date was given.
Illicit liquor — known locally as kasippu — is distilled outside the licensed excise system, is subject to no quality control, and costs the state duty revenue.
Ada Derana was the only verified newsroom carrying this arrest when the article was filed on Tuesday afternoon.
