Police have recovered a T-56 assault rifle, four magazines and 25 rounds of ammunition from an unattended parcel left on the embankment of the Mahakanadarawa tank in Mihintale.
Officers attached to the Mihintale Police searched the site after receiving information on Friday (4) about a suspicious parcel at the location, and found the weapon and ammunition inside it.
The people who brought the parcel to the embankment and abandoned it there have not been identified, police said. Mihintale Police are continuing investigations.
Neither outlet reported an arrest, and no motive has been given for the weapon being left at the site. Police have not said how long the parcel is believed to have lain there, whether the rifle was serviceable, or whether it has been traced to any earlier offence.
The T-56 is a Chinese-made variant of the Kalashnikov and was the standard infantry rifle of the Sri Lankan military during the civil war. Weapons of the type remain in circulation and surface periodically in police recoveries.
Context
Mahakanadarawa is a large irrigation tank in the Anuradhapura district, and its embankment is an open, lightly supervised stretch of public land — the kind of location where discarded ordnance has turned up before in the same district.
In April, a live hand grenade was found in the Nabadawewa reservoir at Eppawala, also in Anuradhapura, by a man who had gone to bathe near the bridge. Police there concluded it had probably been thrown into the water from the bridge above, and called in the Special Task Force to detonate it.
