Relatives of a 29-year-old man who died in custody at Homagama Headquarters Police Station on Sunday have accused officers of beating him to death. Police have not publicly responded, and no official account of the death has yet been reported.
The man was arrested in the early hours of Sunday and held in the station’s cell, Hiru News reported. His family says he died as a result of being assaulted by police officers.
He is named in the report as Francis Durage Ishara Harsha Kumara, a father of one, from Munamalewatta in Kirivattuduwa, in the Homagama area on Colombo’s southeastern edge. (The name is transliterated from Sinhala and the English spelling used by police may differ.)
What the family says happened
Relatives went to the station on Sunday morning to see him. According to their account, he had been taken to the Criminal Investigation unit, and four officers carried him back into the station — he could not walk — and he had been beaten.
Police then arranged, at the relatives’ request, to admit him to Homagama Base Hospital. By the time he arrived, the family says, he was already dead.
A tense situation developed at the hospital grounds as relatives demanding justice for the death became agitated, Hiru reported.
What is not established
This account is entirely the relatives’ allegation. At the time of writing no police statement, no post-mortem finding and no magistrate’s observation had been reported, and this desk found no filing giving the officers’ version of events.
Several basic facts are also missing from the single available report: what the man was arrested for, the exact time of his arrest or of his death, whether any officer has been suspended or placed under investigation, and whether the National Police Commission, the Human Rights Commission or a magistrate has been notified. Under Sri Lankan practice a death in police custody requires a magisterial inquiry; the report does not say whether one has been opened.
A single-source story, and why
Deaths in police custody are ordinarily covered across several newsrooms. This desk searched the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing, the NewsFirst homepage rail and the verified Sri Lankan outlets by name and found no other filing on this death — the story appears to be a Hiru exclusive at this hour, filed at 6.08 p.m. Colombo time.
A search also returned two unrelated cases that share surface features and should not be confused with this one: the April 2026 death of a 19-year-old private university student after a clash at a Homagama hotel, and an April 2025 report of a youth who died in custody elsewhere. Neither is this incident.
Ada Derana could not be checked — its pages have returned a CloudFront error to this desk for 42 consecutive days. This report will be updated if police give an account or another newsroom files.