A young man who went bathing in the Kalu Ganga at Kalutara with two friends has drowned and died, Kalutara South Police said in a report carried by Hiru News on Sunday evening.
The dead man was a resident of the Uggalbada area of Kalutara and worked at a garment factory in Wadduwa, according to the police account.
He had gone to the river to bathe with two friends. Police say the two friends did not enter the water and remained on the bank. When their companion went under and disappeared from view, they raised the alarm at a Navy camp situated nearby.
Two Navy lifesaving officers responded quickly, brought the man out of the water and had him admitted to Kalutara Teaching Hospital. He died while receiving treatment in the hospital’s intensive care unit.
Kalutara South Police are conducting further investigations.
A note on where this happened
The Hiru headline places the drowning in the sea at Kalutara. The body of the same filing — which carries the detailed police account, the locality, the Navy response and the hospital — places it in the Kalu Ganga, the river that reaches the sea at Kalutara. This desk has followed the body of the report rather than the headline, on the basis that the detailed account is the sourced one. Readers should treat the precise stretch of water as carried with that caveat.
The distinction is not academic. The Kalu Ganga’s lower reaches near Kalutara are tidal, and the river has a record of drownings among bathers who enter from the bank: a separate search was mounted on the Kalu Ganga near the Naragala bridge at Horana in late August after a youth was swept away by the current. That is a different incident and is not connected to this one.
Not reported. The filing does not give the dead man’s name or age, the time of day the incident occurred, the point on the river where he entered the water, how long he was submerged, or whether the Navy camp named is the Kalutara establishment. It does not say whether the body has been released for a post-mortem or before which court the inquiry will be held.
Sourcing note: this report rests on a single verified newsroom. A search for other coverage of the same event returned only an unrelated Kalu Ganga drowning from August, and no second verified Sri Lankan newsroom had filed on this incident at the time of writing. Ada Derana has been returning HTTP 403 to this desk for some weeks. This article will be updated if further reporting appears.