According to the Police, as of yesterday (6), law enforcement authorities have taken into their custody 13 Type-56 rifles and pistols used in recent criminal activities. With more than a dozen military-grade assault rifles taken into custody just over two months and a week since 2025 began, the volume of illegal firearms in circulation and the scale of the gun crime situation in Sri Lanka has become more apparent.
The details of reported gun crimes were released at a press conference held yesterday by Police Media Spokesperson Senior Superintendent of Police Buddhika Manathunga, who stated that 19 shooting incidents have been reported so far in 2025, with 12 of those incidents confirmed to be linked to organised crime. He further stated that the remaining seven incidents were the result of personal disputes. Manathunga also mentioned that 68 suspects have been arrested in connection with these incidents.
Sri Lanka has long had serious gaps in its firearms registration mechanism, and despite stringent measure put in place with many hoops to jump through to legally obtain a firearm with a licence, finding weapons and ammunition to feed them in the black market seems like quite an easy affair going by the number of weapons found and the number of shootings which takes place, seeming daily. This Government, as soon as it came into power, recalled all licensed firearms and pledged to conduct an audit of them and review licences issued to bear arms in self-defence. The gaps in the licensing system used by Sri Lanka and the deficiencies in the laws which govern firearms ownership have been well documented. However, even today, Sri Lanka lacks the crucial capability to match bullets and empty shell casings found at crime scenes to the registry of licensed firearms. It is indeed a shame that Sri Lanka has missed out on this capability, given the low number of licensed firearms which are thought to be issued to the public. With a low number of licenced firearms in the country, Sri Lanka could have, through the recent audit, test-fired them and created a digital library of the ballistic signature of licensed firearms. Had such a database been created, which could have also been done for front-line firearms issued to law enforcement, the government analysts could in a brief period have ruled out if any licensed firearms were used in a crime.
Another long-standing issue is that Sri Lanka is awash with small arms from multiple insurgencies and conflicts. The internal conflict in the country, which ended in 2009, left a legacy of hundreds if not thousands of small arms, mostly Type-56 assault rifles and an assortment of pistols, ammunition for them and a fair number of hand grenades. Adding to the issue, there are growing concerns about shortcomings in properly cataloguing and stockpiling small arms recovered from the LTTE during and after the end of the armed conflict in 2009. In mid-2023, highly-placed sources in the defence establishment told The Sunday Morning on terms of anonymity that some of the thousands of small arms which had been taken into custody from the LTTE and stored, post-war, in Army armouries, had not been properly documented and stored safely, which had led to pilfering of assault rifles and pistols. There are concerns that some of them were frequently used by organised criminal groups and gunmen for hire. There is also a thriving criminal element that rents firearms for hire to other criminals. Further, narcotic imports from the Afghanistan-Iran-Pakistan axis via the Indian Ocean to Sri Lanka are also known to include firearms, both pistol and rifles as ‘package deals’ for organised crime networks.
Adding to an already complicated situation, the last five years have shown significant penetration of the Police Department and some elements of the armed forces by organised crime groups. It has been established that some members of the Police and armed forces, both in service and retired, have been used as ‘guns for hire’ in multiple murders. The recent triple homicide in Middeniya has led the Police to arrest one of their own, who is suspected to have supplied the ammunition for the ‘hit’ which saw a father and his two young children shot dead in the drive-by shooting.
Given the alarming links that are coming to light about organised crime and law enforcement/armed forces, and the concerns about arms leakages, it is high time for the Government to act swiftly before more bloodshed occurs. A broad national-level effort is needed to ensure the situation does not deteriorate further.