Maligakanda Magistrate Janitha Roshani Perera has ordered the Colombo probation officer to identify, and report back on immediately, which relatives could take custody of a boy and his sister who were detained after police said they were addicted to ICE.
The order was made on Thursday 29 October after the court considered the facts presented when the two children — aged 14 and 12 — were produced before it, Hiru News reported. The children had been arrested by police, produced in court and placed in probation custody.
Found through a truancy complaint
The two came to official attention not through a narcotics operation but through a complaint that they were not attending school. Officers of the Madampitiya police located the children in the course of investigating that complaint, and 220 milligrams of ICE — crystal methamphetamine — was found.
The children’s mother and several close relatives appeared before the court when the case was called.
Why the order matters
The magistrate’s direction is not a disposal of the case but a placement question: the children are currently in state probation custody, and the court is asking the probation service to establish whether there is a suitable relative to whom they can be released. That the mother was present and the court nonetheless called for a report on possible guardians indicates the placement is not settled.
The case is a concrete instance of a pattern police themselves have flagged. Sri Lanka Police reported in October that 9,105 children and young people were arrested over drug offences in a single year, among them 11 children aged between eight and 14 — a figure the Police Media Spokesperson described at the time as particularly concerning.
A single-source report
No other verified newsroom had filed on this case at the time of writing. Searches of Ada Derana, Daily Mirror, NewsFirst and the Daily FT returned no matching report; Ada Derana’s site has been returning a CloudFront block for roughly seven weeks and could not be checked directly. This account rests on the Hiru News filing alone.
Not reported
The filing does not say when the children were arrested or first produced in court, whether either child faces any charge, or what treatment or rehabilitation has been arranged for the addiction police allege. It does not say whether the children had been enrolled in school, how long they had been absent, or who made the truancy complaint. It gives no next date for the case and does not report any order directed at the mother or at the police.
Neither the children nor their family are named, and this report follows the source in not identifying them.