A man was shot dead and a woman injured when gunmen opened fire at a restaurant in the Soysapura area of Moratuwa on Tuesday evening. Two verified newsrooms have now reported the death — and they do not agree on who died.
The shooting was carried out by men who arrived in a car and fled afterwards, police said. The first casualty was taken to Kalubowila Hospital.
What each newsroom reports
Three filings appeared across a 48-minute window on Tuesday night, and they describe the same attack.
| Filing | Time (Colombo) | Who was shot | Outcome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hiru News | 9.07 p.m. | Shooting targeted the owner of a restaurant | One person injured, admitted to Kalubowila |
| Daily Mirror | 9.36 p.m. | A restaurant owner | Succumbed to injuries |
| Hiru News | 9.55 p.m. | The restaurant’s cashier | Died; a woman also injured |
The Daily Mirror files under a Colombo dateline and attributes its account to the Police Media Spokesperson, saying the victim “was shot by the assailants, who arrived at the scene in a vehicle, and was subsequently admitted to hospital for treatment.” Hiru attributes its filings to police without naming a spokesperson.
The discrepancy, stated plainly
This desk cannot say whether the man who died was the restaurant’s owner or its cashier. The two accounts are not reconcilable from what has been published.
They are also not simply two labels for one man. Hiru’s earlier filing says the gunmen targeted the owner; its later filing says the person who died was the cashier. Read together, Hiru’s two reports describe an attack aimed at one man in which a different man was killed. The Daily Mirror, filing between the two, says the owner himself died.
Neither outlet names the dead man, gives his age, or says whether the owner and the cashier are separate people at this restaurant. No filing states whether more than one person was hit by gunfire.
What the later filing adds
Hiru’s 9.55 p.m. report supplies three details absent from the earlier accounts:
- The weapon was a T-56 assault rifle.
- There were two gunmen, described as unidentified, where the earlier filing said only that “a group” came in a car.
- A woman who had come to the restaurant was also injured and admitted to Kalubowila Hospital. She does not appear in the Daily Mirror’s account at all, which reports only a single victim.
A T-56 is a military-pattern automatic rifle and is the weapon most often reported in Sri Lankan contract shootings. Its use, and the arrival and escape by car, are the features that distinguish this from an opportunistic attack — though no filing has characterised a motive.
Not reported
The motive and the identities of the suspects have not been established, the Daily Mirror says, and police are continuing investigations. No filing reports an arrest, a vehicle description or a registration number, the name of the restaurant, or the exact time of the shooting. None says whether the woman’s injuries are serious.
No account links this attack to any earlier incident, and this desk is not doing so either.
A caution for anyone searching this story. Two separate traps sit close to it. A restaurant owner was shot dead in Kalutara on 9 October — a different district, a different victim and a different case, which searches for “restaurant owner shot” return alongside this one. Separately, Ada Derana carries an older report headlined “Soysapura shooting attack on restaurant traced to an underworld leader” under its legacy numeric URL scheme (/news/64273), far below the five-figure IDs the outlet issues today; it is not a report of Tuesday’s attack. Neither has been used here.
On sourcing. This account rests on two verified newsrooms, Hiru and the Daily Mirror. Ada Derana has also filed on this death — under its current numbering, at /news/250279 — but adaderana.lk has returned a CloudFront 403 to this desk for thirty-two consecutive days, so no publication date could be extracted and it could not be cited under this site’s sourcing rules. Its headline describes the victim as a hotel owner, a third formulation, which is recorded here only to show that the identification is unsettled across outlets rather than between two of them.
Sources: Hiru News — first filing (Sinhala), Daily Mirror — owner shot dead, Hiru News — cashier dies, T-56, second casualty (Sinhala).
Update, 11.20 p.m. — the escape, and both vehicles recovered
Police have traced the gunmen’s escape across two suburbs and recovered both vehicles used in it.
Leaving the restaurant, the attackers drove to Suwarapola, Piliyandala, where they blocked a motorcyclist’s path, fired into the air and seized his motorcycle before fleeing on it, Hiru News reported at 10.13 p.m. The police media spokesman said no one was hurt in that second incident. Police suspected at the time that the car used at Suwarapola was the same one used in the Soysapura attack.
That suspicion is now reported as established. In a later filing at 11.18 p.m., Hiru News reported that the hijacked motorcycle ran out of fuel and was abandoned at Siddhamulla, where police found it — and that the car was recovered abandoned at the same location.
What the escape route adds
The sequence is Moratuwa → Piliyandala → Siddhamulla, a run of a few kilometres inland from the coast, with a vehicle switch in the middle of it.
Swapping a car for a motorcycle is a deliberate manoeuvre: a motorcycle is harder to follow through narrow lanes and does not match any description circulated for the car. That the switch was made by threatening a stranger at gunpoint in the street, rather than with a vehicle prepared in advance, points the other way — to improvisation under pressure rather than to a rehearsed plan.
The ending supports that reading. The stolen motorcycle was abandoned because it ran out of fuel, and the car was left at the same spot — meaning the attackers ended up on foot, having given up both vehicles in one place. Recovering both at a single location gives investigators two vehicles to examine and a fixed point at which the trail was broken.
Both filings are from Hiru News. Neither reports an arrest, a description of the suspects, registration numbers, or whether the car itself was stolen. The Daily Mirror had not filed on the escape when this update was written.
