Columns

Explaining themselves in a hastily summoned press conference this Saturday (February 22nd 2025), the heads of Sri Lanka’s defence, public security and police command hierarchies offered ludicrously poor justifications for the spike in gangland wars during the past week, including the shooting of a ‘mafia don’ seemingly on the orders of a rival inside a courtroom in Huftsdorp causing extraordinary risks to the Bench, the Bar and litigants alike.

Peculiar gang wars inside court

What will we have next, assassins masquerading as lawyers merrily spraying the insides of the Court of Appeal or the Supreme Court with gold tipped bullets? Certainly this is not the first time that gangland wars have erupted inside courtrooms and outside with a highly respected judge (Sarath Ambepitiya) being gunned down outside his home more than two decades ago on the orders of a drug lord angered by a sentence handed down on him.  Even so, the manner in which this latest atrocity occurred is notable.

Significantly peculiar is the remarkable impunity with which the assassin dressed as a lawyer casually enters the court premises with a hollowed out copy of the Criminal Procedure Code containing a gun. He then kills his target right in front of a number of policemen on duty who appear to be too stupefied to catch him. Adding insult to injury, he calmly walks out of the court premises while his female accomplice escapes likewise. In fact, the sheer nonchalance in which this act is carried out awakens ghastly memories of that bitter Easter Sunday in 2019.

That was when smiling young men with backpacks walked into churches and hotels, blasting themselves along with hundreds of innocents. Then as now, the law and order chiefs said, ‘well, we were told that something like this may happen but not that it will be this grave.’ There are other perplexing features of this incident with the gunman being arrested several hours later reportedly on an ‘insider’ tip-off but with the woman being still at large. It requires an incredibly naïve mind to dismiss this incident as a one-off shooting, particularly given the spate of multiple underworld killings within the past few days.

Preposterous claims by the Government

That includes a shooting of another underworld criminal with once close ties to powerful politicians whose two children were also killed in the bloodbath. These murders were aided and abetted by serving police personnel, some of whom have been arrested in what is evidently just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. In the wake of these bizarre occurrences all in a heap as it were, the National People’s Power (NPP) Government did itself no service with its Deputy Minister of Public Security visibly losing his nerve in the face of media haranguing, much like a hare being hunted by hounds.

Meanwhile the Public Security Minister preposterously claimed that the alarming incident in Hulfsdorp and the spate of killings elsewhere was ‘no threat to national security.’ ‘Two killings’ do not constitute a ‘threat to national security’ or to ‘public safety’, he said, going on to beat the familiar drum that ‘those who are asking these questions ruled the country when media institutions were attacked and journalists were killed.’  These claims are highly problematic and counter-productive in several respects.

First, it is high time that the Government stopped talking about the past.  True, Sri Lankan politicians (from Presidents and Prime Ministers downwards) cultivated gangsters with typically colourful aliases as their pets, using them to intimidate and strike fear, sometimes even eliminating opponents if need be. Regardless, that fact does not detract from the primary responsibility of the Government to protect law and order after being elected with an ‘unprecedented peoples’ mandate,’ not to unceasingly whine about the past.

Politico-police-underworld nexus

Second, this Ministerial worthy must be asked to explain what he means by the term ‘national security’? Is this not linked to ‘law and order’ and ‘public safety’? If so, how is it that Sri Lanka’s continuing politico-police-underworld nexus comprises no ‘threat to the nation’? For we repeat, the common feature of all these murders is the direct link to police officers implicated in either the killings themselves or the associated cover-up with additionally, the assassin in the court shooting apparently having links to army intelligence.

Added to this is the continuing killings of suspects while in police custody, most recently being the killing of two assailants arrested in connection with another fatal shooting incident in Kotahena as they had (conveniently) ‘tried to escape.’ These incidents take place, it appears with little adherence to stern warnings by the Supreme Court to the Sri Lanka police to refrain from ‘encounter killings’ as these are commonly known. These happenings are far from being isolated, rather they are interlinked often with the singular aim of protecting criminal masterminds who operate under police and political protection.

These are realities that those tasked with protecting public security, law and order and public safety must recognize rather than nonsensically splitting hairs and attempting to downplay what amounts to an attack on the Court without acknowledging its seriousness. In fact, the performance of the Acting Inspector General of Police (IGP) during Saturday’s press conference was less than reassuring. He cannily avoided questions on whether the police officers involved in Saturday’s killings had adhered to the instructions manual presented by his predecessor in office to the Supreme Court as a guarantee that ‘encounter killings’ will not take place.

The IGP and the NPC

Instead, his ire was directed at the National Police Commission (NPC).  The acting IGP was objecting to the NPC’s use of constitutional powers of appointment, promotion, transfer, disciplinary control and dismissal of police officers (other than the IGP). His complaint was that while other oversight bodies such as the United Kingdom’s Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) could only investigate serious complaints and allegations of misconduct against police officers, the  NPC had an unwarrantedly wide remit.

The constitutional oversight exercised by the NPC was ‘one reason’ for the breakdown of disciplinary control within the police, he said. Evidently these tensions were in relation to recent mass scale transfers of police officers which the NPC had contended had not been sufficiently justified based on performance. That contention was denied by the IGP. Even so, it is curious that the head of the police, (acting as this may be), goes off on a tangent at a press conference called to explain underworld killings, to attack the NPC for not allowing him to ‘discipline his force.’

That follows on the lines of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake expressing strong dissatisfaction with the NPC over this same vexed question of transfers of police officers a few months ago.   Neither are comparisons with the UK’s IPCC, particularly useful in this regard. The UK police operate in an entirely different context with far greater institutional checks and balances, apart from relatively rare cases of institutional failure. Here however, the reality is very different.

When the first NPC was established under the 17th Amendment (2001), it received a frosty if not hostile reception by the (then IGP). The political response by all parties including those currently in power, once the NPC commenced exercising its powers, was no better. Since then, attempts were made to mend relations including providing that the IGP is ‘entitled’ to be present at NPC meetings.

Clearly those conciliatory measures have not worked.