Police say an alleged gangland grenade attack in Dehiwala struck the neighbouring house instead of its intended target. Two boys, aged 11 and 17, died. Their father was injured. Beyond finding the killers, Sri Lanka has another question to answer: where are criminal gangs getting hand grenades?
They were apparently not the target.
That may be the most chilling fact to emerge from Friday morning’s grenade attack in Dehiwala which killed two children and injured their father.
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Police say preliminary investigations indicate that whoever carried out the attack went to the wrong house.
At around 3.20 on Friday morning, a hand grenade was hurled into a residence on Sirisangabo Mawatha in Dehiwala. Two boys, aged 11 and 17, were killed. Their 55-year-old father was injured and admitted to the Kalubowila Teaching Hospital.
Police now say the intended target was allegedly a neighbouring residence associated with an individual suspected of narcotics distribution and linked to organised crime figure Badovita Asanka.
Investigators believe the attack may have arisen from an ongoing confrontation between groups associated with Badovita Asanka and rival underworld figure Kos Malli.
If that preliminary account is correct, two children died for no reason other than that someone allegedly involved in an underworld feud identified the wrong front door.
But there is another question which should not disappear beneath the horror of what happened in Dehiwala.
Where did the grenade come from?
Sri Lanka is becoming grimly accustomed to reports of shootings associated with organised crime. Motorcycles arrive, shots are fired and the attackers disappear.
A hand grenade raises a different question.
Grenades are not ordinary street weapons. They are military weapons designed to kill and injure people within an area rather than a single intended victim.
Yet on Friday morning, one was apparently available to criminals who allegedly intended to settle an underworld dispute in a densely populated residential area.
Police have deployed three teams to investigate the killings and identify those responsible.
There are indications that investigators already have potentially useful evidence. Separate reporting says CCTV footage captured a suspect arriving near the house in a three-wheeler, while a three-wheeler suspected of having been used in the attack was later recovered abandoned in the Ihala Bope area.
That may help Police find whoever physically carried out the attack.
It will not by itself answer the larger question.
Investigators should establish the history of the grenade itself. What type was it? Can its origin or batch be identified? Was it military stock, stolen stock, illegally imported material or part of a cache circulating among organised criminal groups?
And if grenades are circulating within Sri Lanka’s underworld, how many more are there?
The Dehiwala killings do not stand entirely alone against the background of recent violence.
Only days earlier, a 74-year-old man was shot dead at a house in Boralesgamuwa in another attack Police believe missed its intended target. Investigators reportedly believed the gunmen had intended to kill the victim’s son, who was allegedly associated with a person known as Kos Malli.
On September 7, another man described by Police reports as Kos Malli’s brother-in-law was hacked to death at a Dehiwala residence. That killing was also being investigated against the background of alleged rivalry between organised criminal groups.
Those incidents do not prove that every act forms part of one chain. Police must establish that through evidence.
But they do demonstrate why describing each killing simply as another piece of “underworld violence” is no longer enough.
An underworld dispute does not remain within the underworld when a grenade lands in the wrong family home.
It becomes a public-security problem.
There must therefore be two investigations arising from Dehiwala.
The first must find the people who allegedly selected the target, obtained the grenade, transported the attacker and carried out the killing.
The second must follow the weapon backwards.
Who supplied it?
How did that person obtain it?
And is the same source supplying other criminal groups?
The family whose home was attacked appears, on the information presently available, to have had nothing to do with the alleged feud. Police have said the intended target was elsewhere.
Two children therefore appear to have paid with their lives for somebody else’s criminal dispute – and somebody else’s mistake.
Finding the person who threw the grenade will deliver suspects.
Finding where the grenade came from may prevent another family from opening the wrong door.
