Colombo’s Mayor says legal action will be taken against people who used artificial intelligence to fabricate footage of flooding in the city and circulated it on social media.

Colombo Municipal Council Mayor Vraie Cally Balthazaar said action would follow against those who misused AI technology to create fake flood scenes around the city and shared the resulting videos online, Hiru News reported at 10.54 a.m. on Friday.

She was speaking at a session of the Colombo Municipal Council.

The session

The sitting dealt with the inundation of low-lying areas of the capital during the torrential rain that fell on Colombo on 6 November. Hiru reports that the session produced extensive argument between government and opposition municipal councillors.

That is the extent of the filing. It does not say how many videos are involved, where they were posted, what they purported to show, how they were identified as fabricated, or under which law the council intends to proceed. No case, complaint or referral to police is reported as having been filed.

Why this is hard to assess

The 6 November flooding is an event whose basic facts are already contested in the mainstream record, which complicates any claim about what fabricated footage added to it.

This desk has recorded four separate rainfall figures for that day from officials and newsrooms, ranging from 68mm in 40 minutes to 150mm in two hours, with one Daily Mirror filing carrying a headline that contradicted the quote printed directly beneath it. No filing has reconciled them. That dispute is set out in our coverage of the Colombo flood response and in the Cabinet account of the drainage network.

The flooding has also been politically contested from the start. The opposition blamed the government within a day; SJB MP S. M. Marikkar called for the Mayor to resign or be removed over the response; and former minister Patali Champika Ranawaka attributed the failure to the Municipal Council. The Mayor’s statement was made in that setting, to a chamber Hiru describes as divided along party lines.

A second AI-fabrication warning the same day

The Mayor’s remarks were not the only official response to AI-generated content in Sri Lanka on Friday. Roughly an hour later, the Central Bank issued its own notice about fake videos of its Governor circulating on social media, used to advertise bogus investment schemes.

The two are unrelated events with different subjects, but together they mark the first day on which two Sri Lankan public institutions separately warned about AI-fabricated video.

Synthetic-media warnings are not new here. The Prime Minister’s Office, SLCERT and the cricketer Kumar Sangakkara have each issued them over the past six months, in every case about fabricated endorsements of investment schemes. A fabricated news event — footage of flooding that did not occur as shown — is a different use, and this appears to be the first time a Sri Lankan authority has said it will prosecute over one.

A note on the name

The Mayor’s name appears in several transliterations. This desk uses Vraie Cally Balthazaar, the form used in our earlier coverage. Hiru’s Sinhala renders it ව්‍රායි කැලී බල්තසාර්; its own English URL slug reads “vrai kelly balthasar”, and the Daily Mirror has used “Vraie Balthazar”. These are variants of one name, not different people.

Sourcing

This report rests on a single Sinhala-language filing. Checks of the Daily Mirror breaking rail, the NewsFirst homepage payload and the EconomyNext rail on Friday found no English-language account of the Mayor’s statement. It should be treated as Hiru’s reporting until a second newsroom files.

Not reported

Nothing states when the videos appeared, how widely they spread, whether any platform was asked to remove them, or whether the council has identified anyone. No filing says whether the matter has been referred to the Criminal Investigation Department’s cyber unit or to the Computer Crimes Act, the statute that would ordinarily apply. The Mayor is not quoted directly.