Four Indonesian nationals have been arrested at Pelawatte in the Talangama police division with 27 ATM cards and more than Rs 4 million in cash, Hiru News reports.

Officers found 27 ATM cards on the four men and Rs 4,065,000 in their travel bags, along with 200 foreign cigarettes, Hiru News reported, citing the Police Media Spokesman’s Office.

What police describe

The report says information had been received that a group of foreign nationals was withdrawing large sums through ATMs in various parts of the country. On Friday morning the four men were observed behaving suspiciously near a private bank at Pelawatte, using several ATM cards in quick succession and putting the cash into bags they were carrying.

Special Task Force officers on duty nearby, together with officers of the Presidential Security Division’s Maradana unit, were alerted and carried out an immediate raid, questioning the men at the machines. Talangama police were then called to the scene and made the arrests.

The four have been handed over to the Criminal Investigation Department for further inquiry.

What the suspects say

The men told police they work in Port City and had come to withdraw money to pay wages to employees. The filing records that account without testing it, and police are not quoted either accepting or rejecting it.

No charges are stated. Possessing multiple cards is not itself proof of an offence, and the report does not say whether any of the 27 cards is alleged to have been used without the cardholder’s authority.

Two cautions on the headline

Readers searching for this story will meet two traps in the English headline Hiru has given it.

The arrests were made in Sri Lanka, not Indonesia. The English slug reads as though four people “landed in Indonesia”; the Sinhala body is unambiguous that four Indonesian nationals were arrested at Talangama–Pelawatte. This desk has repeatedly found Hiru’s English headline text diverging from its own Sinhala copy, and this is a further instance.

“CIA” here is not the American agency. The headline’s reference is to Hiru CIA, the broadcaster’s own investigative unit, which the filing says received the original tip-off and alerted the officers on the ground.

That second point carries a sourcing consequence: Hiru is reporting on an operation in which Hiru’s own staff say they participated. The account of how the raid came about is therefore the outlet’s account of its own conduct, not independent verification of it. The arrest itself, the card count and the cash figure are attributed to the Police Media Spokesman’s Office.

A note on the figure

The Sinhala gives the sum twice — first as “more than 40 lakhs”, then precisely as 40 lakhs and 65 thousand rupees. That is Rs 4,065,000, or about Rs 4.07 million. This desk converts Sinhala numerals rather than relying on English renderings of them, having previously found lakh and crore mistranslated by factors of 10 and 100 in English headlines on this masthead.

Not reported

The filing does not name the suspects, give their ages, say whose accounts the 27 cards are drawn on, state how much is alleged to have been withdrawn in total, or say how long the alleged activity had been going on. It does not say whether the men hold valid visas, identify their employer at Port City, or say whether any bank reported the transactions. No court appearance is mentioned.

On sourcing: this report rests on a single verified source. A keyword sweep of the Daily Mirror breaking and business rails, the NewsFirst homepage payload and the EconomyNext rail found no other verified newsroom carrying these arrests at the time of writing. As an item originating with the outlet’s own investigative desk, it is the kind of story that is frequently carried by one newsroom alone.