Sri Lanka has recorded 34 shooting incidents linked to suspected underworld activity so far this year, leaving 17 people dead and 18 injured, the Daily Mirror reported.
Investigators have found that several of the incidents stem from disputes between rival criminal groups, including conflicts involving drug-trafficking networks.
The Boralesgamuwa killing
The most recent fatal case was on Malani Bulathsinhala Mawatha, Boralesgamuwa, where a 74-year-old man was shot dead inside a residence on the night of Friday 4 September. Two men who arrived on a motorcycle opened fire with a 9mm pistol before fleeing.
Maharagama Police recovered the motorcycle believed to have been used by the assailants on Saturday (5), abandoned in a paddy field near a temple in the Mahalwarawa area of Pannipitiya.
Who was the intended target?
The two newsrooms give materially different accounts of who was killed and why.
The Daily Mirror reports that the victim was allegedly working as a money collector for an organised-crime figure known as “Kos Malli.”
Ada Derana, reporting two days earlier, says the gunmen were in fact targeting the cashier of a “Kos Malli” associate but missed, and that the bullets struck the cashier’s father instead. It names the dead man as Sunil Fernando, an elderly man who had been suffering from paralysis, and identifies the alleged shooter as an underworld figure known as “Dehiwala Sando,” in a follow-up report.
The distinction matters: one account describes the killing of a man involved in a criminal network, the other the killing of a bystander in his own home. Neither outlet acknowledges the other’s version, and police have not publicly resolved it.
Boralesgamuwa Police are conducting special operations to trace the suspects.
A separate shooting attempt in the Kosgoda police area early on Sunday — in which a gunman’s weapon failed to fire at a relative of the late “Kosgoda Tharaka” — was reported earlier.
