An Indian national was arrested at Bandaranaike International Airport in Katunayake in the early hours of Monday carrying just over five kilogrammes of Kush, Sri Lanka Customs said. The consignment is valued at close to Rs. 51 million.
The man was stopped after arriving in Sri Lanka on a Vietnam Airlines flight, NewsFirst reported at 3.43 p.m. Customs officers found the drug while inspecting his luggage, concealed among his belongings.
The seized stock weighed 5 kilogrammes and 100 grammes. The suspect and the narcotics have been handed to the Police Narcotics Bureau for further investigation.
NewsFirst’s published photograph of the seizure shows the consignment laid out as seven vacuum-sealed transparent packets of cannabis buds on a table, alongside clothing, a jacket and a bag — consistent with Customs’ account that the drug was concealed among the passenger’s belongings rather than in a purpose-built compartment. The packet count is an observation from the photograph, not a figure either Customs or the reporting outlet published.
The third Kush interception at Katunayake this month
The arrest is the latest in a run of narcotics seizures at the airport. On 21 October a Myanmar labourer was held with 4.646kg of Kush hidden among sweets and clothing after arriving from Bangkok on a Thai Airways service. Six days earlier, three Thai nationals were arrested with 5kg 96g of hashish packed inside cosmetic cream containers.
That second case is worth setting beside this one carefully. It involved a different drug — hashish, not Kush — but an almost identical weight and an identical published value of Rs. 51 million. The two are separate arrests eleven days apart, and the matching figure is a coincidence of valuation rather than a sign of a connection.
What distinguishes Monday’s case is the route. The October arrests at Katunayake have run through Bangkok; this one came in from Vietnam.
Not reported
NewsFirst’s filing does not give the suspect’s age or occupation, the flight number, the city he departed from, or the time of arrival. It does not say which court he is to be produced before, or whether he was travelling alone.
It does not state how the consignment was detected — whether by scanner, profiling or a tip-off — or at what point in the arrivals process he was stopped. No valuation method is given for the Rs. 51 million figure.
Ada Derana also filed on the arrest, under a headline giving the quantity as over 5kg. Its pages have returned a CloudFront error to this desk for 43 consecutive days, so no publication date could be extracted and it is named here rather than cited. No other verified newsroom had filed at the time of writing.
