The main suspect in the killing of a man who was doused with petrol and set alight at Oban Place, Dehiwala on August 29 has been arrested by the Mount Lavinia Divisional Crime Investigation Bureau, police said.
The arrest followed information received by the bureau’s Officer-in-Charge, Ada Derana reported. The suspect was found hiding in the Kandy area, where he had gone after the murder, and police also recovered the car he is alleged to have used to leave the scene.
Under questioning, the suspect reportedly told police he carried out the killing as revenge for the murder of his own father about two years ago.
Police place both men in rival networks
Police said the suspect is a close associate of an alleged organised-crime figure known as “Kosmalli”, while the man killed was a close associate of another figure known as “Badowita Asanka”. Both are accused of drug trafficking, according to police.
Neither man has been named, and police did not say when the suspect will be produced before a magistrate.
A feud that keeps returning to the same streets
The names in the police account are ones that recur across this year’s gun violence in the southern Colombo suburbs, though investigators have not publicly connected the cases.
An associate of the Badowita Asanka network was arrested in August with more than 15 grams of “Ice” by the Walana Anti-Corruption Unit, and was held at Mount Lavinia Police Headquarters.
Oban Place itself has featured before. In July, a man described by police as the father of an alleged organised-crime figure known as “Sando” was shot and wounded at the Mount Lavinia public cemetery; police recorded him as a resident of Oban Place, Dehiwala. Nothing in the current reporting links that shooting to the August 29 killing, and the suspect’s account of his father’s death places it around two years ago rather than in July.
Police assigned four special teams in August to a run of shootings across Mount Lavinia, Dehiwala and Ratmalana that they attributed to rivalry between organised crime groups — including an attempt on a Dehiwala bakery owner said to have been ordered on behalf of “Sando”, whose son police described as an associate of “Kos Malli”.
Not reported
Ada Derana’s report does not give the suspect’s age or home area, the date of the arrest, the identity of the man killed, or whether anyone else is being sought. It does not say whether the suspect’s father’s death is an open case, nor whether the Mount Lavinia bureau is treating the killing as part of the wider gang conflict police described in August. No other verified newsroom had carried the arrest at the time of writing.
