A 74-year-old man was shot dead at his home in Boralesgamuwa on Friday night by two men who arrived on a motorcycle, police said.

The shooting took place on Malani Bulathsinghala Mawatha while the victim was at his residence, Ada Derana reported. Police said the two assailants were unidentified, that they arrived by motorcycle, and that a pistol was used.

The dead man was a resident of the Boralesgamuwa area. Boralesgamuwa Police have opened an investigation on the basis of information received, and further inquiries are under way to trace and arrest the two.

Ada Derana filed the report at about 10 p.m. local time, initially as a one-line alert that a person had been killed, and updated it to add the victim’s age and the account of how the attack was carried out.

An attack with the marks of a targeted killing

Police have not offered a motive and have not said whether the victim was known to them. But the elements they have described — two assailants on a motorcycle, a handgun, and a victim shot at his own address rather than in a public confrontation — are the pattern of a planned attack rather than a chance encounter.

The age of the victim is the detail that sits least easily with that reading, and on Friday night no outlet had reported who he was or what, if anything, connected him to the people who shot him. Police answered both questions the next day — see the update below.

The wider picture in the south of the city

Boralesgamuwa and the suburbs immediately around it have seen repeated gun violence this year. In Bellanwila, next door, a 55-year-old restaurant owner was shot dead near the walking track in July and two suspects, one of them an army deserter, were arrested. In August a 20-year-old was held on Lake Road in Boralesgamuwa with “Ice,” a sword and a knife, and police said at the time that he had been planning a murder.

Further along the coast, police assigned four special teams in August to a run of shootings in Mount Lavinia, Dehiwala and Ratmalana that they attributed to rival organised crime groups. Friday’s killing was also the second shooting reported in the Colombo area that day, after two people were wounded in Kollupitiya in the early hours.

Nothing in the reporting so far links Friday’s killing to any of those cases.

Update (September 5): victim named, and police say the bullets were meant for his son

Boralesgamuwa Police released a fuller account on Saturday. The dead man has been identified as Sunil Fernando, 74, who had been suffering from paralysis, Ada Derana reported.

Investigators say the shooting was carried out by a man identified as “Dehiwala Sando”, described as a member of an underworld gang, and that the intended target was the cashier of an associate known as “Kos Malli”. The gunmen missed, and the bullets struck the cashier’s father instead.

Two assailants arrived on a motorcycle and opened fire with a pistol before fleeing, police said — consistent with Friday night’s account. Boralesgamuwa Police are running special operations to trace and arrest them.

NewsFirst, filing at 12.07 p.m., said police believe a dispute between organised criminal groups may have led to the killing and that two police teams are working on the case. It did not name any of the figures involved. Daily Mirror carried the original account without the new detail.

That resolves the question this article raised on Friday — the victim’s age fitted the killing badly because he was never the target.

The same two names, in a second case the same weekend

“Kos Malli” appears again in a separate arrest announced on Saturday. Police say the main suspect in the killing of a man doused in petrol and set alight at Oban Place, Dehiwala on August 29 is a close associate of “Kosmalli”, and that the man killed was an associate of “Badowita Asanka”. No outlet has connected the two cases, and police have not said they are linked.

The earlier August reporting on the four special police teams assigned to shootings in Mount Lavinia, Dehiwala and Ratmalana described the same rivalry from the other side: an attempt on a Dehiwala bakery owner said to have been made on behalf of “Sando”, whose son police identified as an associate of “Kos Malli”.

Update (September 5): the motorcycle is found abandoned in a paddy field

Maharagama Police have recovered the motorcycle they believe the gunmen used, Hiru News reported on Saturday.

It was found abandoned in a paddy field near the Digana Ancient Viharaya in Mahalwarawa, Pannipitiya, several kilometres inland from the scene. A team recovered it after information reached the Officer-in-Charge of the Community Policing Unit at Maharagama Police Station.

Hiru’s account adds one detail to the police version of the motive: the gunmen went to the house intending to kill the son, and shot the father because the son was not at home at the time.

The recovery brings a second police station into a case that Boralesgamuwa Police opened, and confirms the attackers abandoned the vehicle rather than keeping it.

Not reported

Police have not named the intended target or the alleged gunman beyond his alias, and have not said whether “Dehiwala Sando” has been arrested. It is not stated whether the case remains with Boralesgamuwa Police or has been passed to a specialist division, and no outlet has explained how investigators identified the shooter within a day of the killing.

On the motorcycle, Hiru does not give its make, registration or ownership, does not say whether it was reported stolen, and does not report whether forensic examination has begun or produced anything. It is not stated how the tip to the Community Policing Unit was received.

Sources