News
Drug deal within court premises
A prisons officer and two guards were interdicted yesterday as a full probe was launched on how an international drug dealer in prison custody was allowed to meet an associate inside a detention cell in the Colombo Chief Magistrate’s court, Prisons Commissioner General Rohana Pushpakumara said.
The big drug dealer, Mohamed Siddique, a resident of Maradana, had been given a life sentence by an Indian court in 2001 for possessing six kilograms of heroin. He escaped while he was in hospital in Tamil Nadu and returned to Sri Lanka. At Piliyandala in 2009, he was arrested on charges of a similar offence but he escaped to Pakistan thereafter.
He was arrested by the Pakistan authorities and sent to Sri Lanka in March this year. He was placed under detention orders and produced in courts for the first time on Thursday. The Commissioner General said an inquiry had been launched to find out how an outsider had been allowed to enter the cell and spend time with the suspect.
A lawyer who witnessed the outsider entering the cell had alerted Chief Magistrate Gihan Pilapitiya. Lawyer Thushara Daskon said he had felt suspicious about the movements of the outsider who was seen entering the cell unaccompanied.
The outsider spent time with the drug dealer and was seen leaving the cell later. In an apparent bid show him as a prisoner, the prison guards, meanwhile, had handcuffed the outsider with the drug dealer, so that his presence would not raise any suspicion. The outsider was later seen leaving the cell.
Mr. Pushpakumara said he had called in the Criminal Investigations Department (CID) to carry out an inquiry and arrest the outsider who entered the cell. Police sources said the outsider has been identified as a drug dealer from Maradana.