An inmate undergoing rehabilitation at the Weerawila open prison camp has died after being attacked by a deer on the camp grounds, Weerawila police say.
The man was taking part in cleaning work on the camp premises on Sunday evening when he was gored by a deer that had been roaming freely on the grounds, Hiru News reported.
He was admitted to Debarawewa Hospital for treatment and died there. Police began an investigation after receiving a complaint about the incident.
The dead man was 30 years old and a resident of the Warapalana area. His body has been placed in the mortuary at Debarawewa Hospital, and a post-mortem examination was scheduled for Monday.
Weerawila police are conducting further inquiries.
Context
Weerawila, in the Hambantota District, is the site of one of Sri Lanka’s open prison camps, where selected inmates serve the latter part of their sentences under a lower-security regime that includes work and rehabilitation duties on the camp grounds. The camp sits in the dry-zone country near Weerawila and Debarawewa, an area with substantial free-ranging wildlife, including spotted deer.
Deer are not generally regarded as dangerous to humans in Sri Lanka, and the great majority of fatal wildlife encounters recorded here involve elephants — two were reported in the past week alone, an army sergeant killed in Ampara and a group of schoolchildren confronted by a wild elephant at Yahangala. Male deer can nonetheless inflict serious injuries with their antlers, particularly during the rut.
Not reported
The filing does not name the dead man, state what sentence he was serving, or give the time of the attack beyond Sunday evening. It does not say whether the deer was wild or a habituated animal living on the camp grounds, whether prison staff were present, or what the cause of death was recorded as — the post-mortem result had not been published at the time of writing. It does not report any comment from the Department of Prisons.
Update, 9 November: the Daily Mirror has since filed its own account, citing police, which matches Hiru’s on every reported detail — the inmate’s age, his home area of Warapalana, the cleaning duty, the Sunday evening timing, admission to Debarawewa Hospital, the post-mortem scheduled for Monday and the Weerawila police investigation. It adds that the deer was roaming freely within the camp premises and that the man died after being rushed to hospital. This report is no longer single-source.
