Two men who allegedly posed as doctors using forged documents were arrested in Meegalewa on Tuesday, along with a stock of medicines valued at around Rs. 1.5 million, Hiru News reported.

Officers of the Walana Central Anti-Vice Striking Force carried out the arrest on information received by the unit, with assistance from the Kurunegala Regional Director of Health Services.

The suspects

The two men are aged 33 and 62 and are residents of the Meegalewa area. They were handed over to the Meegalewa Police Station after being taken into custody.

Officers of the Kurunegala District Drug Inspector’s office, Medical Officers of Health and the Meegalewa Police are conducting further investigations.

Context

Meegalewa is a rural town in the Kurunegala District, in an area served by a limited number of state health facilities. Prosecutions for practising medicine without qualifications recur in Sri Lanka’s outlying districts, where unregistered practitioners can operate for extended periods before a complaint reaches the Regional Director of Health Services.

The seizure of roughly Rs. 1.5 million in medicines alongside the arrests indicates the scale of what was being dispensed, though the report does not say over what period the two had been operating.

Not reported

This report rests on a single verified source. Ada Derana also filed on the arrests, but its site has returned a CloudFront block to this desk for fifteen consecutive days and that report could not be retrieved. No other verified newsroom had covered the arrests at the time of writing.

Hiru does not say what qualifications the forged documents purported to show, which authority they claimed to come from, or how long the two are alleged to have been practising. It does not say how many patients they are believed to have treated, whether anyone was harmed, or whether the medicines seized were prescription-only or counterfeit.

No report says whether the two operated a single clinic or several, whether they will be produced before a court, or what charges are contemplated. There is no account from the suspects or anyone representing them.

Source: Hiru News.