The Police Special Task Force has arrested a man it describes as the main accomplice in the drug trafficking operations of the organised crime figure known as “Welioya Priyantha”.
The arrest was made at Kahathuduwa, NewsFirst reported. The STF said officers found 123 grams and 500 milligrams of Ice — crystal methamphetamine — along with a mobile phone and an electronic weighing scale in the suspect’s possession.
The man is 32 and a resident of Polgasowita, Kahathuduwa.
Context
The seizure is small by the standards of recent cases, but the weighing scale and the phone are the items police typically cite as evidence of distribution rather than personal possession.
The arrest comes during a sustained push against organised crime networks and the assets behind them. Police said in August that assets worth about Rs. 6 billion had been frozen across 113 investigations since September 2024, and the Illegal Assets Investigation Division opened asset probes into 25 organised crime and drug figures the same month.
Methamphetamine remains the drug driving the largest cases. Police are still investigating an international network after a large consignment of Ice was seized at the Colombo Port in a case that drew in the US Drug Enforcement Administration and Pakistan’s Anti-Narcotics Force.
Not reported
NewsFirst was the only outlet carrying the arrest at the time of writing, and its report is brief. It does not name the suspect, say when the arrest took place, or state which STF unit made it. It gives no account of where “Welioya Priyantha” himself is, whether he is wanted, charged or abroad, and nothing in our archive records the alias before today. It is not reported whether the suspect has been produced before a magistrate or which police division will conduct the investigation.
