President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has appointed Air Chief Marshal Kolitha A. Gunathilake (Retd.) as the new Chancellor of General Sir John Kotelawala Defence University (KDU).
Gunathilake is a former Commander of the Sri Lanka Air Force who later served as Chief of Defence Staff, the country’s senior-most military post, the Daily Mirror reported.
The letter of appointment was handed to him by Secretary to the President Dr. Nandika Sanath Kumanayake at the Presidential Secretariat.
KDU is Sri Lanka’s military-run degree-awarding university, training officer cadets alongside civilian undergraduates. The chancellorship is a ceremonial headship, and the post has conventionally gone to a retired senior officer.
A note on the date
The Daily Mirror’s report states the letter was handed over “yesterday (5)” while carrying an inline publication stamp of 5 October 2026, 7:35 p.m. Those two statements cannot both be right. Following the paper’s more reliable convention, we take the parenthesised day of the month — 5 October — as the date of the handover.
Not reported
The filing does not name the outgoing Chancellor, give a reason for the change, state the length of the appointment, or say when Gunathilake takes up the post. It does not record any comment from the appointee or from the university.
A caution on sourcing this story: “New chancellor appointed to Kotelawala Defence University” is a recurring headline at KDU, and a search for it returns earlier appointments — including an Ada Derana filing under a much older article ID and a defence.lk report of General Kottegoda’s appointment. Those are previous Chancellors, not this one. The current appointment is identified by the appointee (Air Chief Marshal Kolitha A. Gunathilake), the appointing President, and the Presidential Secretariat handover. No second verified newsroom was found with its own report of this appointment; Ada Derana’s site has returned a CloudFront block for eleven consecutive days.