The Police Special Task Force (STF) has seized 227kg and 620g of Kerala cannabis packed into 102 parcels from two locations in the Kalutara district, in a cache that police say is linked to a large-scale trafficker and organised-crime figure known as “Dubai Nipuna,” NewsFirst reported on Monday.
One stash was found abandoned and hidden by the roadside during a raid in Kalutara South. The second, a far larger consignment, had been buried in the Aluthgama lagoon area and was recovered after a second sweep by STF teams along the coastal belt. No suspects were present at either site at the time of the recovery.
The narcotics have been handed over to Kalutara South Police for further investigation. Officers said the parcel counts and the use of submerged storage points to a syndicate that is intentionally splitting consignments across multiple drops to limit losses to any single seizure.
The bust follows a 220kg Kerala cannabis recovery by the STF and Army at Antonypuram in Jaffna on June 7 that police also attributed to the same “Dubai Nipuna” network — placing the combined two-day seizure at more than 447kg from opposite ends of the island.
“Dubai Nipuna” is the operational alias by which the STF has identified the trafficker; the underworld figure is believed to operate from Dubai and to coordinate the inland routing of large Kerala cannabis consignments smuggled into Sri Lanka by sea. The two June 7-8 seizures mark the most significant single-network operation against the syndicate this year and follow the wider government’s Rata Ekata anti-narcotics campaign under which Sri Lanka has logged record drug-arrest totals.
