Mohamed Shariff Adam Lebbe, known as ‘Ghafoor Mama’, has been sentenced to 12 years of rigorous imprisonment over the stockpiling of explosives and prohibited materials at Wanathawilluwa. He pleaded guilty to all five indictments against him, and the seven and a half years he has already spent in custody will be deducted — leaving roughly four and a half years to serve.

The sentence was imposed on Wednesday by a three-member bench of the Colombo High Court, the Daily Mirror reported at 1.49 p.m. Colombo time. He is the third defendant in the case.

The bench comprised Justices Lal Ranasinghe Bandara, Rashmi Singappuli and Nayomi Wickramasinghe. It ordered a 12-year term on each of the five counts, all to run concurrently — so the total remains 12 years rather than 60.

What came off the sentence

The judges ordered that the seven and a half years the defendant has already spent in remand custody and under detention orders be deducted. On that basis he is expected to serve approximately another four and a half years.

In fixing the term the bench weighed several factors: his guilty plea, which avoided a prolonged trial, and his age of 63.

That arithmetic is worth stating plainly, because the headline figure and the time actually remaining are different numbers. A 12-year sentence announced in October 2026 against a man held since roughly early 2019 is, in practice, a release date around 2031.

The case is not finished

The sixth defendant, Mohamed Rameez Mohamed Sajith, known as ‘Sajith Moulavi’, asked the court for time to decide whether to plead guilty to the charges he faces. The court ordered the case taken up again at 8 a.m. on Thursday (29 October) to hear his decision, and directed the Superintendent of Prisons to produce him by 7.45 a.m.

The bench also directed authorities to provide special security for Ghafoor Mama when producing him before the Kegalle and Batticaloa High Courts, where he faces two further pending cases.

Where this sits in the Wanathawilluwa prosecutions

The Wanathawilluwa case concerns a cache of explosives and prohibited materials found at a property in the Puttalam district, a discovery made months before the April 2019 Easter Sunday attacks and later folded into the investigation of that network.

Wednesday’s sentence is the third outcome this desk has recorded in the case in under a month. Two defendants pleaded guilty on 2 October, and on 7 October two were sentenced to 10 years’ rigorous imprisonment, after the court had moved to daily hearings from 5 October. The pattern across all of them is the same: guilty pleas rather than contested trials, and sentences fixed with the plea treated as mitigation.

Not reported

The filing does not set out what the five indictments charged, or under which statutes they were framed — so it is not possible to say from this report whether the counts were brought under the Explosives Act, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, or both. It does not give the date of his arrest, state the quantity or type of material recovered, or say what the two pending Kegalle and Batticaloa cases concern.

It does not say why special security was ordered for his future court appearances, nor how many defendants remain to be dealt with in the Wanathawilluwa indictment overall.

Single-source. Ada Derana filed on the sentencing as news ID 250704, carrying the same bench, figures and age, and adding that the property was at Lactowatta in Wanathawilluwa and describing the court as the Colombo Special High Court. Its site has returned an HTTP 403 block to this desk for 48 consecutive days, so the filing cannot be dated or cited here. Neither Hiru News nor NewsFirst had filed on the sentencing at the time of writing — both rails were checked directly.