A 38-year-old man has been arrested after a cache of firearms, live hand grenades and close to 4,000 rounds of ammunition was found inside a cinema building on the Kirindiwela–Hanwella road, Hiru News reported on Sunday morning.
The arrest was made by the Colombo Crime Division (CCD).
What was recovered
Police said the search of the cinema turned up:
- two pistols
- a revolver
- a repeater-type firearm
- two live hand grenades
- close to 4,000 live rounds of ammunition
That is four firearms and two grenades in a single location, alongside an ammunition stock far larger than the weapons themselves could account for in ordinary use.
Why the quantity is the story
A handful of illegal firearms turns up regularly in Sri Lankan police reporting. An ammunition stock approaching 4,000 rounds does not. The disproportion between four weapons and several thousand rounds points to storage rather than possession for use — a holding point rather than an individual’s weapon.
Hiru reports that the CCD is investigating both the arrested man and the background of what it describes as an organised stock of firearms. That characterisation is the police’s, and no filing has yet connected the cache to a named group, a prior case or a specific criminal network.
The two live hand grenades are the element that most clearly separates this from a conventional illegal-firearms recovery. Grenades are military ordnance and have featured in Sri Lankan organised-crime cases involving gang attacks rather than in ordinary weapons offences.
The location
The cinema sits on the Kirindiwela–Hanwella road. The two towns are in the Gampaha and Colombo districts respectively, on a route connecting the outer Colombo suburbs to the interior — which is why coverage of the recovery has variously been filed under either town’s name. A disused or lightly used public building is an unusual storage site, and no filing explains how the cache came to be there or whether the cinema’s operators were aware of it.
Not reported
The suspect has not been named, and no filing states his occupation, his relationship to the cinema, or whether he owns, manages or merely had access to the building. Neither the name of the cinema nor whether it is still operating has been reported.
Police have not said how the CCD learned of the cache, whether the recovery followed a tip-off, surveillance or another arrest, or how long the weapons are believed to have been stored there. The origin of the grenades, whether the firearms are locally made or imported, and whether any of the weapons has been linked by ballistics to an earlier shooting are all unreported.
No court appearance has been reported, and no detention or remand order has been announced.
A note on sourcing. This report rests on a single newsroom. Ada Derana has also filed on the recovery, but adaderana.lk has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for 29 consecutive days, so no publication date could be extracted from its report and it could not be used or cited under this site’s sourcing rules. No other verified Sri Lankan newsroom had filed on the recovery at the time of writing. The account above should be read as Hiru’s, not as a cross-checked consensus.
Sources: Hiru News (Sinhala).
