Fourteen people have been arrested for mining gems without a licence in the Bogawantalawa and Maskeliya areas of the central hills, in two separate raids, NewsFirst reported on Friday.
Nine suspects were taken into custody along with mining equipment during a raid in the Keselgamuwa reserve, police said, for mining without a valid licence.
Those nine are aged between 27 and 59, and are residents of Bogawantalawa, Pelmadulla, Opanayaka, Ratnapura, Kuruwita and Hatton.
A second raid in the Brownswatta area of Maskeliya produced five more arrests, also for unlicensed gem mining. Those five were identified as residents of Balangoda.
Miners from the gem country, digging in the hills
The home towns listed for the arrested men point to a pattern the report itself does not draw out. Of the places named, Pelmadulla, Opanayaka, Ratnapura and Kuruwita all lie in Ratnapura District — the centre of Sri Lanka’s licensed gem trade — as does Balangoda, where all five of the second group live.
That puts most of the fourteen a considerable distance from the pits they were found at: men from the gem belt working unlicensed ground in the Nuwara Eliya hill country, rather than locals digging close to home. Bogawantalawa and Hatton residents account for the remainder.
The same reserve, a second time in a fortnight
This is the second enforcement operation reported in the Keselgamuwa catchment in just over two weeks, and the two should not be confused.
On 24 September, Special Task Force officers from the Maskeliya camp arrested three men — all residents of the Bogawantalawa Mora Estate, aged 23, 39 and 42 — for digging along a stream running into the same reserve. They were handed to Bogawantalawa Police and released on police bail.
Friday’s raids are a larger and separate operation: fourteen arrests rather than three, an older age range, and suspects drawn mostly from outside the area. The outlets render the place name variously as Bogawantalawa and Bagawantalawa, and the watercourse as Keselgamu Oya or Keselgamuwa — these are transliteration variants of the same locality, not different sites.
The reserve matters beyond the gems. It forms part of the catchment feeding the Castlereagh reservoir, one of the impoundments in the Laxapana hydropower complex. Unlicensed pitting in a catchment carries a silt and erosion risk to water the national grid depends on.
Unlicensed gem digging remains a steady enforcement target. In July, 25 people were arrested over illegal gem mining in Horana.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not name the police division or unit that carried out either raid, or say whether the Special Task Force was involved as it was in September. It does not say what equipment was seized or in what quantity, whether any equipment was recovered in the second raid, or whether any gems were found.
The report gives no court, no date of production, and no indication of whether the fourteen were bailed or detained. It does not say how long either operation had been running, whether the National Gem and Jewellery Authority took part, or whether estate managements were aware of the digging.
Ages and home towns are given for the nine arrested at Keselgamuwa but not for the five at Brownswatta, beyond their district.
At the time of writing no other verified newsroom had filed on these arrests. Searches returned only earlier operations in the same family — including raids at Mahaeliya forest reserve, Chapelton estate and Keselgamuwa Oya from previous years — none of which is this event. Ada Derana’s site has returned a CloudFront block to this desk for eighteen consecutive days and could not be checked.
The image published with this report is a stock illustration, not a photograph of the raids.
Sources: 14 arrested for illegal gem mining in Bagawantalawa, Maskeliya — NewsFirst, 9 October.
