A Welikada Prison officer has been arrested at the prison entrance carrying narcotics concealed inside his footwear, Hiru News reported.
Officers of the Emergency Response Tactical Force stopped the guard as he entered and ordered him to remove his shoes for inspection.
What was found
The search recovered 8.510 grams of heroin and 54.110 grams of Ice — crystal methamphetamine — concealed inside one shoe.
The suspect is named as prison guard S.A.A.E. Samaratunga, who was on duty handling prisoner registration: a post with direct access to inmates entering custody.
He was produced before the Maligakanda Magistrate’s Court, where investigators obtained permission to detain and question him for seven days. Hiru reports the questioning is being conducted under the direct supervision of the Inspector General of Police — an unusually senior level of oversight for a single-officer narcotics arrest.
A recurring breach
This is at least the third reported case this year of a serving prison officer accused of moving drugs into a Sri Lankan prison. In August, an officer was arrested over an alleged drug supply to the Magazine Prison, and another was detained in a surveillance operation at Sahaspura.
The pattern matters because prison drug supply is what makes narcotics networks operable from inside custody — the premise behind the organised-crime cases this desk has covered through the year.
A possible second arrest, unresolved
Ada Derana published a report of a Welikada prison officer arrested for attempting to smuggle narcotics in his shoes, but the details do not match. That account describes 96 grams of Ice and 16.7 grams of heroin, an arrest on 14 September, and an investigation by the Borella Police Criminal Investigation Unit — different quantities, a different date and a different arresting unit from Hiru’s.
Ada Derana has been returning CloudFront errors to this desk for several weeks and could not be fetched to verify, so it is not cited here. Whether these are two separate arrests at the same prison within two days, or one incident reported with materially different figures, cannot be resolved from the available reporting. Hiru’s account is given here as filed.
Not reported
Hiru does not give the suspect’s age, rank or length of service, does not say on what date the arrest took place, and does not say who the drugs were intended for inside the prison. It does not say whether any inmate is under investigation, whether the officer has been interdicted, or what charges are contemplated. No response from the Prisons Department is recorded.
