The Special Task Force has arrested two 23-year-old men from Kotahena whom police describe as the shooter and motorcycle rider for an organised-crime group run from outside Sri Lanka, Hiru News reported.
The arrests followed a raid mounted on information received by the STF’s Intelligence Division. Officers seized a shot-cut firearm — a sawn-off weapon — together with five 12-bore cartridges, 22.34 grams of “Ice” (crystal methamphetamine), a mobile phone and a travel bag. The suspects and the productions were handed to Kotahena Police for further investigation.
The photograph released with the account shows the seizure laid out: the sawn-off firearm and a separate barrel section, a sealed bag of white crystalline material, the backpack, and five shotgun cartridges — a count that matches the inventory and clarifies the force’s awkwardly rendered “05 bore-12 ammunition”.
What the suspects are said to have told police
Police say that under questioning the two described a planned killing. The group, they said, shot and killed a man named “Asela” in November 2025 after he refused a request to join it. The two men arrested this week had been assigned, police say, to shoot one of Asela’s two children in reprisal for that refusal.
These are accounts attributed to suspects in custody and relayed by the STF. No charge has been reported, no court appearance described, and the claims have not been tested in court. Hiru does not give Asela’s full name, where he was killed, or whether anyone was ever arrested for his death.
A name that is easy to get wrong
Hiru names the principal as “Palani Canister”, describing him as an organised criminal and large-scale drug trafficker operating from abroad. The group name does not otherwise appear in this newsroom’s records, and the account gives no country, no real name and no indication of whether Sri Lanka is seeking him.
It should not be read as the same person as Palani Shiran Croorian, whose alleged Colombo distribution network produced four arrests by the Pettah Police Special Bureau in September — one of those four was also a Kotahena resident, and Palani Shiran is himself held abroad, at the Tiruchirappalli open prison camp in India. The overlap of a shared first name, a Kotahena address and a principal outside the country makes conflation easy.
Nor is either man Palani Rimoshan, a third figure of the same prefix who appears in Sri Lankan crime reporting as the suspected head of a rival faction in a separate Kotahena shooting. “Palani” recurs across unrelated underworld aliases and is not by itself an identifier.
Context
The case fits a pattern this desk has followed through 2026, in which Sri Lankan trafficking and contract-violence networks are directed from outside the country’s jurisdiction while the people carrying out the work are recruited locally and young. Both men arrested here are 23.
Not reported: no other verified newsroom had filed on this operation at the time of writing — a domain-restricted search and a sweep of the Daily Mirror’s latest-news listing returned nothing — so this account rests on a single source. Hiru does not say when or where the raid took place, whether the two have been produced before a magistrate, whether the child said to have been targeted has been given protection, or whether the November 2025 killing of Asela was previously recorded as unsolved.
