Five people, among them an officer and soldiers attached to the Mattala Air Force camp, have been arrested over the alleged shooting of deer inside the grounds of Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport and the sale of the meat to civilians, the Daily Mirror reported.
Police have taken into custody a firearm and a knife said to have been used in the killings, an Air Force jeep used to move the venison, and the motorcycle ridden by the officer.
How the operation worked
According to the police account, deer roaming the airport grounds were shot and killed, then taken to a bathroom inside the Air Force camp premises to be butchered. The meat was passed to two civilians waiting outside the electric fence on the airport perimeter.
The detail of the electric fence is notable: it is the barrier meant to keep animals off the runway and out of aircraft paths, and it appears here as the handover point in an alleged trafficking chain rather than as a safeguard.
Deer at Mattala are a long-standing aviation problem
Mattala’s wildlife problem is well documented. In April the Department of Wildlife Conservation and the Civil Aviation Authority signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at reducing wildlife-related incidents around the airport while safeguarding biodiversity in the surrounding area. The airport sits on the edge of dry-zone scrubland where spotted deer are abundant, and animal strikes have been treated as a flight-safety risk since it opened.
Culling or removing animals at Mattala has always been a matter for the wildlife and aviation authorities working under that framework. Shooting them for meat is not, and deer are a protected species under Sri Lanka’s wildlife legislation.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror does not name any suspect, give the rank of the officer, say how many deer were killed or over what period, or state how long the alleged operation had been running. It does not say who conducted the raid, when the arrests were made, what charges the seven face, or when they are to be produced in court. It does not say whether the Air Force has opened its own inquiry or suspended anyone, and carries no comment from the Air Force, the Airport and Aviation Services company or the Department of Wildlife Conservation.
The report’s phrasing is also ambiguous on the arithmetic: it describes “five individuals, including an officer and soldiers from the Mattala Air Force camp, along with two civilians,” which can be read either as five people in total including the two civilians, or as five service personnel plus two civilians.
This report is single-source. Ada Derana carried the story but its site returned a CloudFront error (854 bytes) on every attempt, as it has for several weeks; NewsFirst, Hiru News, the Island, Daily FT, Colombo Gazette and EconomyNext had not filed on it at the time of writing.
