A 45-year-old man from Minuwangoda has been arrested over fraudulent documents allegedly prepared for a suspect in the February shooting of a lawyer and his wife at Akuregoda, Hiru News reported on Thursday.
The arrest was made by the Western Province South Crimes Division, which is leading the investigation. The man is accused of aiding and abetting a suspect in the double murder by preparing the documents.
Hiru puts the killing on 13 February, in front of a supermarket in the Akuregoda area of Thalangama, where the lawyer and his wife were shot dead.
This is the second forgery arrest in the case
The detail that gives the arrest its weight is that it is not the first of its kind.
On 30 September, the same Western Province South Crime Division arrested a 48-year-old Grama Niladhari from the Meewala area of Attanagalla, accused of preparing a forged identity card in the name “Ruban Suresh” for the main gunman to use in fleeing the country. Hiru reported that the Grama Niladhari was summoned to give a statement on the basis of accounts the gunman himself had given, and confessed. He was produced before the Kaduwela Magistrate’s Court.
The two arrests are distinct, and should not be read as one story told twice: a different age, a different locality, a different occupation and — on the reporting available — a different document. Taken together they indicate investigators are working through a chain of people who supplied the main suspect with false identity papers, rather than a single forger.
What kind of document
Hiru’s English filing says only “fraudulent documents” and does not specify what they were.
Ada Derana’s headline on the same arrest describes the document as a passport, and that characterisation also appears in aggregator republication. This desk has been unable to fetch Ada Derana for several weeks — the domain returns a content-delivery block — so the filing could not be read or dated, and the passport description is recorded here as unverified rather than reported. Hiru’s wording is what this article relies on.
The case so far
The shooting took place on 13 February in the Akuregoda area of the Thalangama Police Division. The couple were inside their vehicle when two gunmen, travelling in another car, opened fire and killed both at the scene, the Daily FT reported in February.
A suspected gunman — a 46-year-old former soldier who had left the army legally under the 2009 general amnesty — was arrested on 21 February at Delduwa in the Ambalangoda Police Division, by the Homagama Divisional Crime Investigation Unit working alongside the Western Province South Crime Division. Three people had already been held in the Kottawa, Athurugiriya and Kahathuduwa police areas on suspicion of assisting and conspiring in the attack.
In May, police appealed for public help to trace the driver of the vehicle used in the shooting.
Not reported
Hiru does not name the arrested man, say when or where he was taken into custody, identify which suspect the documents were prepared for, or state what offence he is alleged to have committed. It does not say whether he has been produced before a magistrate, remanded or bailed, and gives no indication of how he came to the division’s attention. No total of arrests in the case has been issued by police in any filing this desk could fetch.
This article is single-sourced. Ada Derana has carried the arrest but could not be fetched; no other verified newsroom this desk was able to reach had filed on it at the time of writing.
