Four people have been arrested over the killing of a 24-year-old man whose body was burned and thrown into the Kelani River more than a year ago, Hiru News reported on Sunday evening. Two of those held are businessmen.
The arrests followed a special operation by the Colombo District Crimes Division, Hiru reported at 7.37 p.m.
What police say happened
The dead man was a resident of Sedawatta Road, Wellampitiya. On 11 October last year — a Saturday — he had been drinking with several other people in the Wellampitiya–Sedawatta area, according to the account police have given.
He was assaulted and killed there. His body was then loaded into a cab, taken to Pugoda and burned behind a factory, then carried on to Kosgama and thrown into the Kelani River from the Aswatta bridge.
Police also recovered a motorcycle said to have belonged to the dead man. It had been broken down into parts and hidden in a house in the Sellakataragama area.
A special search of the Kelani River was carried out in the relevant stretch on Sunday, with the Navy taking part.
One inconsistency in the filing
Hiru’s opening sentence places the killing “in the Grandpass area.” Its own later paragraphs place both the drinking and the assault at Wellampitiya–Sedawatta, several kilometres upriver, and give no role to Grandpass in the sequence.
This desk has followed the detailed account rather than the opening line, because that is where the sourced narrative sits — but the discrepancy is unresolved, and a reader should treat the locality of the killing itself as unsettled.
A caution for anyone searching this case
Two separate Kelani River cases come back alongside this one and neither is it.
Police have described a different killing in which a 19-year-old was abducted on 22 April, strangled and drowned at the riverbank near Delgahawatta Junction in Mattakkuliya, with five suspects arrested and two overseas-based organised crime figures named as having directed it. Separately, a 2022 report of a youth’s body recovered from the river near Grandpass circulates widely and is four years old.
The discriminators here are the victim’s age (24), the date (October last year), the method — beaten, burned, then dumped — and the number arrested (four). Neither of the other cases has been used in this report.
Sourcing and what is not reported
This account rests on a single verified newsroom. The Daily Mirror’s breaking-news listing, checked while this was written, had not carried the story; no other verified outlet this desk could reach had filed on it.
The dead man has not been named, and neither have any of the four arrested. Hiru does not say when the arrests were made, where, what each suspect is alleged to have done, or whether a motive has been established. It does not report whether the body was recovered at the time, whether anyone has been produced in court, or what Sunday’s river search was looking for a year after the event.
