The Criminal Investigation Department has told the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court that a court order for data from the mobile phone of Kapila Chandrasena, the former SriLankan Airlines chief executive, was sent by email to the telecommunications company holding it — a company in the United States — on August 18, NewsFirst reported.
The disclosure was made to Fort Magistrate Pasan Amarasena when the magisterial inquiry was taken up again on Wednesday.
The context the report leaves out
NewsFirst identifies Chandrasena as a suspect in the SriLankan Airlines Airbus scandal, which is accurate but incomplete in a way that matters for reading the story. Chandrasena is dead. He was found dead at his Colpetty residence in May, in a death treated as an apparent suicide, while the Airbus bribery case against him was live — he had been remanded in April after bail was rejected.
The proceeding now before the Fort Magistrate is therefore the inquest into his death, not a prosecution of him. His phone is being pursued as evidence about how and why he died.
Four months to reach the phone company
The phone has been the central unresolved item in the inquest since the spring, and the route to its contents has changed twice.
In May, when the inquiry had reached its fifth day and eighteen witnesses, it was the Colombo Crimes Division telling the court it had emailed the US Federal Bureau of Investigation for help unlocking the handset, with further progress dependent on the FBI’s reply.
What the court heard on Wednesday is a different approach by a different agency. It is now the CID, not the CCD; the request is a judicial order served on a telecommunications company rather than a request for technical assistance from a law-enforcement agency; and it seeks data associated with the phone rather than access to the device itself — the records a carrier or platform holds on its own servers, which do not require the handset to be unlocked.
The order went out on August 18. Three weeks later the court was told only that it had been sent. No response from the company has been reported.
An inquest that keeps returning without answers
The pattern is now familiar in this case. In July the court was still pressing for the post-mortem report to be submitted without delay, four months after the death. The phone data request has followed the same course: an instruction issued, an inquiry adjourned, and a subsequent sitting told the request remains outstanding.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not name the telecommunications company, say what data the order seeks, explain why the case moved from the CCD to the CID, state whether the earlier FBI request was answered or abandoned, or give the next inquest date. It does not say whether the post-mortem report has since been filed.
Sourcing note
NewsFirst is the only verified newsroom to have filed on Wednesday’s sitting. The Daily Mirror’s latest-news listing carried nothing on the case, and Ada Derana returned a CloudFront 403 domain-wide throughout this cycle.
Note also that Chandrasena is a heavily collided surname in this archive: the former SriLankan Airlines CEO is a different person from S.M. Chandrasena, and from the Grama Niladhari in an unrelated phone-records case. This report concerns Kapila Chandrasena.
