Customs officers opened nine air-mail parcels at the Central Mail Exchange in Colombo on Wednesday and recovered Kush, hashish, cocaine and ecstasy worth Rs. 60,265,000. The parcels had been posted from four countries to addresses in Sri Lanka that turned out to be fake.
The seizure was made by officers of the Customs Narcotics Control Division at midday on Wednesday, Hiru News reported at 3.25 p.m. Colombo time.
What was in the parcels
The nine parcels were sent from Thailand, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States to various parts of Sri Lanka. They held Kush, hashish, cocaine and ecstasy.
The stated value is Rs. 60,265,000 — six crore, two lakh and sixty-five thousand rupees in the filing’s own notation.
The addresses were fictitious
This is the part that distinguishes the case. Nobody came to collect any of the parcels. When officers then checked the addresses they had been sent to, the addresses were found to be fake.
Only at that point were the parcels opened. The examination was carried out at midday on Wednesday in the presence of Police Narcotics Bureau officers and Postal Department officials at the Central Mail Exchange. The consignment has been handed to PNB officers in Colombo for further investigation.
The use of fictitious addresses is a recognisable method: the sender posts to an address that does not exist or does not belong to the intended recipient, who then arranges to intercept the item in transit or at delivery, leaving no name on the paperwork to trace. Where the interception fails, the parcel simply sits uncollected — which is how both of this month’s hauls came to light.
The second such seizure in nine days
This is a different consignment from the one this desk reported on 19 October, and the two should not be confused. They were nine days apart at the same facility, and the figures differ throughout:
| 19 October | 28 October | |
|---|---|---|
| Parcels | 11 | 9 |
| Value | Rs. 67.53 million | Rs. 60.27 million |
| Countries | 8 | 4 |
| Drugs | Cannabis, MDMA pills, “Mandy” | Kush, hashish, cocaine, ecstasy |
The 19 October seizure involved parcels posted from Thailand, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Germany, accumulated over several months and opened after the collection period lapsed. Spain does not appear in that case at all, and cocaine was not among the drugs recovered.
A caution on matching this story by its headline figure: “Rs. 60 million in drugs at the Central Mail Exchange” is a headline that has recurred repeatedly in Sri Lankan reporting — including a separate Rs. 60 million Kush seizure from Thailand in December 2025 and another in July 2025. The value alone does not identify a case. The discriminators here are the nine parcels, the four countries including Spain, and the 28 October date.
It closes a gap the earlier case left open
This desk’s report on the 19 October seizure recorded that the filings did not establish how many separate addressees were involved, or whether earlier parcels to the same addresses had been delivered successfully. Wednesday’s filing supplies the answer for its own consignment: the addresses were not real ones. It does not speak to the October 19 parcels.
Not reported
The filing gives no weights — not for the consignment as a whole, nor broken down by drug — so the Rs. 60.265 million cannot be checked against any quantity or unit rate. It does not say how the four countries map onto the nine parcels, or how the drugs were distributed between them.
No arrest is reported. The filing does not say whether anyone has been identified, what the parcels were declared as containing, how long they sat at the exchange before the collection period lapsed, or how they were first flagged for inspection. It does not name any officer or give the Customs file reference.
Single-source. Ada Derana filed on the same seizure as news ID 250721, under a headline giving the value as Rs. 60 million at the Central Mail Exchange, but its site has returned an HTTP 403 block to this desk for 48 consecutive days and the filing could not be dated or cited. Neither the Daily Mirror nor NewsFirst had filed at the time of writing — the Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing and the NewsFirst rail were both checked directly, and the Daily Mirror, which carried the 19 October seizure, has not filed on this one.