Four separate hand grenade attacks have been reported across Sri Lanka in the past 45 days, killing two people and injuring one more, Hiru News reported on Friday.
Authorities suspect the attacks arise from conflicts between organised criminal groups, and multiple special police teams have been deployed to investigate them.
The tally is the first attempt by any newsroom to count the run of grenade attacks on residential properties as a single pattern rather than as separate incidents.
The most recent attack
The deaths both came in the most recent incident, in the early hours of Friday, when two brothers were killed in a grenade attack on a house on Sirisangabo Mawatha, Dehiwala. Their father was injured and is being treated at Kalubowila Teaching Hospital.
Hiru gives the brothers’ ages as 11 and 17. As this publication reported on Friday, the newsrooms do not agree on that point: Ada Derana and the Daily Mirror’s first report both put the dead brothers at 10 and 14 and said their 52-year-old father and two other children were seriously injured. NewsFirst and the Daily Mirror’s later update give 11 and 17, a 55-year-old father, and no other injured children. Hiru follows the second set of particulars.
That divergence matters for the tally. Hiru’s island-wide count of one person injured across all four attacks holds only on the NewsFirst version of the Dehiwala attack. On the Ada Derana and Daily Mirror account, that single attack alone injured three people.
A police probe has since found the grenade was thrown at the wrong house — the intended target was a neighbouring residence reportedly linked to a drug distributor associated with the organised crime figure “Badowita Asanka.”
The locations do not match this publication’s reporting
Hiru names the earlier attacks as having occurred in Kalubowila and Ratmalana, which leaves one of its four incidents unlocated.
Reporting published here over the same window records four grenade attacks on homes, but not in those places:
| Date | Location | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| 5 August | Ratmalana | Two grenades thrown at a house; four arrested on 9 August |
| 23 August | Borella | Grenade thrown at a house, failed to detonate; no injuries |
| 10 September | Kohuwala | Grenade thrown at a house; no injuries |
| 11 September | Dehiwala | Two brothers killed; father injured |
The count of four agrees. The locations do not. Police Spokesman ASP F. U. Wootler placed Thursday’s attack on Wimalasiri Mawatha in Kohuwala, not Kalubowila — the two are adjacent and fall within the same Dehiwala–Mount Lavinia police division, so they may be the same incident described loosely. Hiru does not mention the Borella attack at all, though police there also described it as arising from a dispute between organised criminal groups.
A grenade recovered from a canal in Ja-Ela on 1 September, behind SJB MP Kavinda Jayawardhana’s home, was a find rather than an attack and does not belong in either count.
Not reported
Hiru does not name the fourth attack’s location, give dates for any of the earlier incidents, or say which police division compiled the 45-day figure or from what start date. It does not say whether the four are believed to involve the same weapons source, the same faction, or unrelated disputes, and it does not reconcile its casualty count with the accounts that report additional injured children in Dehiwala. No arrest is reported in the Dehiwala or Kohuwala attacks.
Ada Derana was unreachable behind a CloudFront block and the Daily Mirror was unavailable at the time of writing, so this account rests on a single source for the tally itself; the individual attacks it references are separately sourced in the articles linked above.
