Two boys were asleep in their home in Kawdana, Dehiwala, in the hours before dawn on Friday, when a hand grenade meant for a house they did not live in tore through their world instead. They did not wake up. Their father, badly wounded, remains in hospital, left to make sense of a loss no parent should ever have to comprehend. Police now say the attack was a case of mistaken identity, the intended target was a neighbouring house linked to a narcotics dispute between two rival underworld factions. Whether the grenade found its correct target or not makes no difference to the boys who died in their sleep. It was never their war to begin with.

This is not the first-time children have paid for a violence they had no part in. On 9 May 2017, a Police Narcotics Bureau team was ambushed in Piliyandala by gunmen armed with a T56 assault rifle, in an attack that killed a police constable and left the lead investigator fighting for his life. In the chaos of that gunfire, an 11-year-old girl and two other children from the same family were struck by stray bullets. The girl succumbed to her injuries days later. On the night of 18 February 2025, in Middeniya, a 39-year-old man was shot dead on his motorcycle in an ambush that also killed his six-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son, both of whom were riding with him. Investigators later said a T56, a weapon meant for the battlefield and not the back roads of Hambantota, had been used. Nine years separate Piliyandala from Middeniya, and barely twenty months separate Middeniya from Dehiwala. 

What connects these cases is not simply that children happened to be nearby when adults settled scores. In each instance, the children were physically present at the very heart of the violence: on the back of a motorcycle beside a marked man, asleep in a house their killers believed belonged to someone else, or standing close enough to a police operation to be struck by military grade weaponry discharged on a public street. These were not accidents in the way a road traffic collision is an accident. They were the entirely foreseeable consequence of allowing armed men to settle criminal disputes with weapons designed for war, in the middle of residential neighbourhoods, at times and places where families, and their children, are naturally present.

The National Child Protection Authority handles thousands of complaints of abuse each year, covering everything from domestic cruelty to online exploitation. Yet a child killed because their parent, or simply their neighbour, was entangled in the underworld rarely enters that conversation at all. These deaths are filed as underworld crime statistics, mourned briefly, and then folded into the numbing catalogue of gang violence that has become background noise in our national life. Nobody asks, in any sustained or official way, how the State failed in its basic duty to keep a sleeping child safe in their own bed.

Part of the answer lies in how easily military ordnance finds its way into criminal hands. The Piliyandala gunman was identified as an army deserter. The Middeniya killing used a weapon typically issued to the armed forces. A grenade, of the sort that should exist only in a military armoury, was thrown at a family home in a Colombo suburb. Each of these facts points to the same uncomfortable question: how many such weapons remain unaccounted for, and what is being done, beyond press statements after each tragedy, to trace and recover them before they claim another child's life.

Investigations, arrests and courtroom proceedings will no doubt follow the Dehiwala attack, as they did after Piliyandala and Middeniya. But convictions after the fact cannot undo what has already happened, and they offer little comfort to families who have learned that their children are not safe even within their own walls. What is needed is a far more serious national reckoning with how firearms and explosives move from State custody into gang hands, and a recognition that child protection in this country cannot stop at the boundaries of the home. Until then, every family living near a contested drug turf, a feuding gang, or simply an unlucky address, will continue to wonder whether their own children are sleeping safely tonight, or merely sleeping until the next mistake.