Three persons who engaged in bribery-activities for 3 years ....

Three persons who engaged in bribery-activities for 3 years ....

loitering around guest houses, brothels, wearing police uniforms ....

caught in the net!

A police constable who had been sent on Vacation of Post by the Sri Lanka Police Department, with the connivance of two other

friends had been acting in the guise of the police had been accosting people for wrongdoings and extracting bribes and collecting money from them. This racket has been busted by the Special Crimes Operations Unit of Mirihana. This clan of racketeers had been extracting money from couples coming out from guest houses by entangling them in having committed wrongdoings, accosting those who violate traffic rules and avoiding the police and various other offences such as getting hold of youth who associate underaged prostitutes by all the while using robbed police uniforms.

This particular constable had been in service for 13 years with the police and because of a fraud involving cheques he was subjected to interdiction by the Police Department. It was after that he had thrown his hand at this nefarious activity and had accumulated a large sum of money through these bribery-activity and had even managed to get vehicles and property and other assets. He had also indulged in casino activities in a big way, it is understood. He was actually cornered by the police when he was travelling in a luxury vehicle in Ja Ela area. This vehicle which they had utilised for their racket had not been even registered in his name and it was learned that it was a vehicle which had been rented out for a sum of 60,000 for a month.

The reason for him to be cordoned by the police was that he had stopped a certain vehicle belonging to an estate superintendent in Delkanda and had tried to demand a bribe from him saying that the said vehicle number compared with a number of a vehicle where a previous road accident killing a person was involved. It was a road accident which really had happened and in connection with which a legal case was pending at that time.The estate owner who really believed that they were police officers happened to palm over Rs. one lakh twenty-five thousand. However later when checking this with his lawyers, it was revealed that such police officers were not in service at that time. The estate superintendent suspicious about some unknown police officers demanding a bribe had complained to the police, saying so. The police conducting investigations on those lines had received a complaint about three similar individuals from Pannipitiya Vidyalaya Junction and that was a case where a young boy of a wealthy family had got into a three-wheeler to get intimate with a twilight woman when these three people had surrounded the three-wheeler and had looted a sum of Rs. ninety thousand by threatening him.

In this manner they had cornered young boys and young girls who frequented guest houses and well-to-do businessmen as well at various places for a period of about 3 years and demanded bribes from them and it has been revealed that they had even gone to the extent of secretly collecting internal information of the Police Department in the case of certain raids. These three suspects have been taken into custody already and further interrogations are being carried out in this connection.