The Assistant Superintendent of the Trincomalee Remand Prison was arrested on Tuesday by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption over an alleged bribe of Rs. 1.235 million, taken from a contractor supplying food to the inmates in his care.
He was arrested at around 3.29 p.m. while inside his office, according to CIABOC, the Daily Mirror reported.
The allegation
The officer is alleged to have solicited and accepted the payment through a prison jailor — that is, through a subordinate rather than directly — from a supplier providing dry rations to inmates at the Trincomalee prison.
The structure of the allegation is what distinguishes it from a routine bribery arrest. The money is said to have come from a contractor whose business is supplying the prison’s food, and to have passed through an intermediary on the prison staff. Both features matter to an eventual prosecution: the first establishes the commercial relationship said to have been exploited, the second determines whether the case rests on direct evidence or on the account of a serving officer.
The arrested officer is due to be produced before the Trincomalee Magistrate’s Court.
A run of arrests of serving officials
The arrest is the latest in a series of CIABOC detentions of public officials in recent weeks. In early October a court registrar in Minuwangoda was arrested on bribery allegations, and the commission has been active against officers in the justice and corrections systems in particular.
At Rs. 1.235 million, the sum alleged here is substantially larger than in most CIABOC detection cases, which typically involve payments in the tens of thousands of rupees.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror filing does not name the arrested officer, and LankaNewz has not been able to confirm a name from a source it has verified directly — a name circulating in search results could not be traced to a newsroom report or to a CIABOC release, and is therefore not published here. Nothing is reported on whether the jailor said to have carried the payment has been arrested or is being treated as a witness, or whether the supplier made a complaint that triggered the operation.
No filing gives the date on which the alleged bribe was solicited, the value or duration of the dry-rations contract, or what the payment was allegedly sought in return for — whether for awarding the contract, settling invoices, or overlooking a deficiency in supply. There is no indication of how long the officer has held the post, whether he has been interdicted by the Department of Prisons, or whether the Department has commented. The commission has not said whether the case forms part of a wider inquiry into prison supply contracts.
