A 30-year-old man who went into a cave in the Diyahitithenna forest at Koslanda to hunt an animal that had taken shelter there was crushed by a falling rock and found dead inside the cave on Sunday morning, police say.
The dead man was R. Ramesh of Uwamawelagama in the Diyahitithenna area of Koslanda, a married daily-paid labourer, the Daily Mirror reported.
What happened
He went into the forest on Saturday afternoon with a 17-year-old youth who lives nearby, to hunt the animal after it entered the cave. While he was trying to remove rocks from inside the cave, a large rock broke loose and crushed him.
Only about two feet of his body, including his feet, remained visible outside the cave. The rest was trapped inside.
Koslanda Police recovered the body after being informed, and a police guard has been posted at the site. The victim’s wife, whom he had married recently, was in the Ratnapura area at the time.
Investigations are continuing under the direction of senior police officers in the Uva Province and the Badulla District.
On the animal
The Daily Mirror describes the quarry as an armadillo. There are no armadillos in Sri Lanka — they are native to the Americas. The burrowing, scale-covered animal that Sri Lankan English-language reports routinely call an armadillo is the Indian pangolin, which shelters in caves and rock crevices of exactly this kind.
If that is the animal, the hunt was illegal: the Indian pangolin is a protected species under Sri Lanka’s fauna and flora legislation, and it is among the most heavily trafficked mammals in the world. The filing does not identify the species itself, and this desk is not asserting one.
Not reported
The filing does not say whether the 17-year-old was inside the cave at the time, how he raised the alarm, or how long the body lay there before police were told. It does not say whether the animal was caught, whether either man was armed, or whether any wildlife offence is being investigated alongside the death. No inquest date is given. This report rests on a single source.