A stock of case productions including a repeater gun has been stolen from the Bibila Magistrate’s Court, police said.

Courts Registrar Dayaratne Baddevithana complained to police on Thursday, 1 October that 50 case productions were missing from the court’s production room, the Daily Mirror reported. The missing items include a repeater gun, jewellery, cash, parts of a weapon and SIM cards, all relating to cases pending before the court.

The Monaragala Special Crime Investigation Unit is conducting the investigation.

Why court productions matter

Case productions are the physical exhibits held by a court as evidence in proceedings that have not yet concluded. Their loss is not only a theft but a potential obstruction of the cases they belong to: a firearm, its components, seized cash and SIM cards are frequently the material on which a prosecution turns, and where an exhibit cannot be produced, the charge that depends on it can become difficult or impossible to prove.

The 50 items span multiple pending files, so the number of affected cases is likely to exceed the number that have been identified publicly so far.

An institutional failure, not an isolated one

The Daily Mirror filed the report under the headline “Who will guard the guards themselves?” — a pointed framing, because the production room is a secured area inside a court complex and the theft was reported by the court’s own registrar.

Thefts from court and prison production stores have surfaced before in Sri Lanka, including cash taken from the Wariyapola Magistrate’s Court production room and a repeater firearm that went missing from Negombo Prison. Those are separate and much earlier incidents, and the recurrence of near-identical headlines makes them easy to conflate. What identifies this case is Bibila, the 50 items, and the registrar’s complaint of 1 October.

Not reported

The Daily Mirror does not say over what period the items went missing, when the loss was discovered, how the production room is secured, whether any court or police staff are under suspicion, or how many pending cases are affected. No arrests had been reported at the time of writing.

The Daily Mirror was the only newsroom LankaNewz tracks carrying this report at the time of writing; no other verified outlet had published its own account.

Source: Who will guard the guards themselves? — Daily Mirror, October 3.