A 74-year-old man was shot dead at his home in Boralesgamuwa on Friday night by two men who arrived on a motorcycle, police said.
The shooting took place on Malani Bulathsinghala Mawatha while the victim was at his residence, Ada Derana reported. Police said the two assailants were unidentified, that they arrived by motorcycle, and that a pistol was used.
The dead man was a resident of the Boralesgamuwa area. Boralesgamuwa Police have opened an investigation on the basis of information received, and further inquiries are under way to trace and arrest the two.
Ada Derana filed the report at about 10 p.m. local time, initially as a one-line alert that a person had been killed, and updated it to add the victim’s age and the account of how the attack was carried out.
An attack with the marks of a targeted killing
Police have not offered a motive and have not said whether the victim was known to them. But the elements they have described — two assailants on a motorcycle, a handgun, and a victim shot at his own address rather than in a public confrontation — are the pattern of a planned attack rather than a chance encounter.
The age of the victim is the detail that sits least easily with that reading, and no outlet has yet reported who he was or what, if anything, connected him to the people who shot him.
The wider picture in the south of the city
Boralesgamuwa and the suburbs immediately around it have seen repeated gun violence this year. In Bellanwila, next door, a 55-year-old restaurant owner was shot dead near the walking track in July and two suspects, one of them an army deserter, were arrested. In August a 20-year-old was held on Lake Road in Boralesgamuwa with “Ice,” a sword and a knife, and police said at the time that he had been planning a murder.
Further along the coast, police assigned four special teams in August to a run of shootings in Mount Lavinia, Dehiwala and Ratmalana that they attributed to rival organised crime groups. Friday’s killing was also the second shooting reported in the Colombo area that day, after two people were wounded in Kollupitiya in the early hours.
Nothing in the reporting so far links Friday’s killing to any of those cases.
Not reported
Police have not released the victim’s name, occupation or any suspected motive, and have not said whether the attackers spoke to him or fired from the road. No description of the motorcycle or the gunmen has been issued, no arrests have been announced, and it is not stated whether the case has been handed to a specialist division or remains with Boralesgamuwa Police. Ada Derana was the only verified newsroom carrying the killing at the time of writing.
