A 12-year-old schoolboy has died after being attacked by a crocodile at a bathing place on the Wambatuwewa tank, in the Maneruwa area of the Galkiriyagama police division.
The boy was W.M. Sadev Damsiri Warnasuriya, a grade eight student at Maneruwa Maha Vidyalaya who lived in the Maneruwa, Wambatuwewa area, Hiru News reported on Saturday afternoon.
He had returned home from school on Friday 23 October and gone to bathe at the tank with an adult woman. While he was sitting on the steps of the bathing place, which were under water, a crocodile concealed in the tank seized him and carried him away, according to the report.
The search
Residents mounted a search from Friday evening and continued through to Saturday morning.
High water in the tank obstructed the operation. During Friday night, a backhoe was used to cut the tank’s spill so that the water level would fall. The boy’s body was found inside the tank on Saturday morning.
That sequence is the part of this account that carries beyond the single death. The villagers were not waiting on a specialised recovery team; they altered the tank itself overnight to make a search possible. Tanks across the dry zone have been running high through the rain of the past fortnight, and a submerged bathing step is a bathing step that gives no visual cue about the depth or the water beyond it.
Context
This desk recorded a fatal crocodile attack at Halmillagollawewa in the Polpithigama area in September. Both took place at an inland tank in the dry zone rather than at a river mouth or lagoon, and both involved someone entering shallow water at a customary access point.
The island is also in the middle of a sustained spell of heavy rain, with reservoirs spilling and flood warnings running across several basins. Raised water at a village tank does two things at once: it covers the steps and markers that tell bathers where the shelf ends, and it extends the depth in which a large animal can lie unseen close to the bank.
Separately, NewsFirst reported on Saturday that the government is to formulate a national policy to prevent drowning. No filing connects that work to this death.
Not reported
The report does not say whether the woman who accompanied the boy was injured or whether she witnessed the attack. It does not say whether the Department of Wildlife Conservation was notified, whether the animal has been located or is being searched for, or whether the tank has been closed to bathers. It gives no estimate of the crocodile’s size, and does not say whether the bathing place had been the subject of any prior warning or complaint. No post-mortem finding is reported.
On sourcing: no other verified newsroom had filed on this death at the time of writing. The image published with the report is genuine footage from the scene rather than stock, but it shows the recovered body under a covering and is not reproduced here.
Sources: 12-year-old schoolboy dies after being attacked by crocodile — Hiru News, October 24 (Sinhala).
