Most 10-year-olds saving up coins are dreaming of sweets, a toy, perhaps a new pair of shoes. Suranjani Maduwanthi’s daughter is saving hers for a headstone.
“My daughter is collecting money to build a good monument on her father’s grave,” Suranjani said quietly, sitting beside her mother-in-law in their home in Minuwangoda.
Her husband, Sandun Chathuranga Silva, 34, a daily-wage construction worker and former garment factory machine operator, died within hours of being transferred out of the Negombo Prison in the aftermath of the July riot.
His 10-year-old daughter and six-year-old son no longer have a father. For their mother, there has been no death certificate, no post-mortem report, and – more than two months on – no official explanation.
In every household visited for this article, the person left to pick up the pieces was a woman: a wife, a mother, a grandmother, suddenly the sole earner, sole carer, and sole point of contact with the justice system.
A riot and a reckoning with overcrowding
The Negombo Prison riot, which unfolded over two days on 5 and 6 July, is among the deadliest episodes of prison violence in Sri Lanka’s history.
Located roughly 35 km north of Colombo, the facility saw the first clash on Sunday that left two inmates dead, before a far larger confrontation broke out the following morning during breakfast. By the time the unrest was brought under control, 32 people – 22 inmates and 10 prison officials – had died, and more than 100 others had been injured.
Human rights groups and Government officials alike have pointed to chronic overcrowding as the structural failure underlying the tragedy. The Negombo Prison was built to hold 650 inmates; at the time of the riot, it held roughly 2,400.
Sri Lanka’s prisons as a whole are estimated to be holding around 40,000 people in facilities designed for 10,000 – a national overcrowding rate that the Department of Prisons’ own 2024 Performance Report put at 286.6%, based on average daily population against approved capacity.
Following the riot, more than 700 prisoners were transferred out of Negombo to other facilities, including the Angunakolapelessa Prison in the deep south. It is what happened after those transfers that has drawn the sharpest scrutiny.
The Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) has opened a formal investigation into the deaths of at least two inmates shortly after they arrived in Angunakolapelessa, amid allegations of reprisal torture, denial of medical care, and, according to several families, invented causes of death.
‘It was by those shorts that I identified him’
Among those killed on 6 July, inside the Negombo Prison itself, was Mohomad Nisam Mohomad Faslun, 40, a cook who had been remanded under Section 54 of the Poisons, Opium, and Dangerous Drugs Ordinance since October 2025. His wife, Chandani Kumari Rathnayake, 35, was left to care for their seven children alone – the youngest a premature baby of four months, the eldest a married adult.
On the morning he died, their eldest son had visited him in prison. Faslun told his son that a clash had taken place the previous night between two groups of inmates, but that it had been brought under control, and that he and those around him had not been involved and had faced no problems. By around 10 a.m., renewed unrest had broken out inside the prison. Faslun was shot and killed.
No one from the authorities came to tell Chandani her husband was dead. She learnt of it, like the other women interviewed for this article, through reports of the disturbance and her own subsequent enquiries – searching hospitals with barely enough money in her pocket for bus fare.
“In those final moments, he was wearing the shorts I bought for him,” she said. “It was by those shorts that I identified him.”
Chandani’s vulnerability did not begin with her husband’s death; it was compounded by it. She was disowned by her Buddhist parents when she converted and married Faslun at 14, and after the funeral, his relatives cut ties with her as well – leaving a woman who had been isolated from her own family for two decades to now face widowhood with no support network on either side.
“Now they say they won’t take responsibility for me,” she said. “After the funeral, they cast me aside.”
She is now raising seven children in two small rented rooms, with no cooking facilities beyond a small kerosene oven, no money for baby formula, and a monthly rent of Rs. 16,000 she struggles to meet.
Her 13-year-old daughter now looks after her younger siblings whenever Chandani has to attend court – a girl doing the unpaid care work an adult should be doing, so that her mother can chase paperwork the State has not volunteered. Her 16-year-old son works nights at a restaurant to help support the family, an arrangement that has effectively pushed a teenager into the breadwinning role his father once held.
“He didn’t leave any money behind for me,” Chandani said. “To file a High Court case, Rs. 35,000–40,000 is needed. How can I do it when he didn’t leave any money behind?”
Of her life now, she said simply: “I am weary of samsara. I never thought in my life that something like this would happen to me. I just need to raise my young children.”
‘Do not touch the body’
Sandun Chathuranga Silva was arrested at his Minuwangoda home on 22 May on suspicion of drug possession and remanded on 27 May under Section 52. According to his family, he could not be granted bail because the Government Analyst’s report on the substance allegedly found on him was still pending – a wait that, in Sri Lanka, can stretch to nearly a year.
On 6 July, relatives visiting the Negombo Prison were unable to get information about his whereabouts. The next day, they discovered his name on a list of inmates transferred to the Angunakolapelessa Prison, hundreds of kilometres to the south.
On 8 July, a Police officer arrived at the family home in Minuwangoda to inform them that Sandun had died of a heart attack at the Angunakolapelessa Hospital, at around 10.50 p.m. the previous night – roughly 15 minutes after admission.
When the family went to identify his body at Tangalle Hospital, they found it unrecognisable. “My son had ‘father’ tattooed on one side and ‘mother’ tattooed on the other side,” his mother, Sriyani Jayathilaka, 54, recalled. “It was only when they looked for those tattoos and the tattoo of his father’s birthday that they could identify him.”
According to the family, Sandun appeared to have suffered severe physical assault; they described hundreds of marks on his body consistent, in their view, with repeated blows from a stick or similar object, alongside a facial injury the family said he had never had before.
Prison officers present at the hospital had reportedly told them that inmates transferred from Negombo may have been assaulted either in transit or before leaving Negombo. Throughout, the family said, they had been repeatedly warned: “Do not touch the body or move him, and do not take any photographs.”
More than two months later, the family has received neither an autopsy report nor a death certificate; authorities have cited ongoing judicial inquiries. To bring Sandun’s body back to Katunayake for burial, the family – daily-wage earners who sell vegetables and make firecrackers – spent more than Rs. 160,000, mortgaging their land deed and pawning a young child’s gold jewellery to cover hearse and transport costs.
It is Sandun’s wife and mother, not his male relatives, who now make the journey to court. The family must travel overnight, at their own expense, to attend hearings at the distant Angunakolapelessa Magistrate’s Court – a round trip they say costs roughly Rs. 3,500 per person per day.
Because the men in the family cannot afford to lose a day’s wages, that burden, and the physical risk that comes with it, falls squarely on the women: two women travelling through the night on public transport to a court hundreds of kilometres away, repeatedly, without male relatives accompanying them, raising real concerns for their safety that they said they had raised with no one, because there was no one to raise them with.
Shot after bail was granted
Suresh Jayalath Silva, 35, of Liyanagemulla, Seeduwa, had lived with and supported his 62-year-old mother, Nirmala Ariyawathi. After his arrest by the Negombo Police in May under Section 54, following months of legal effort, his mother succeeded in securing him High Court bail. On 6 July, he was brought to the Mahara Courts Complex for the final steps of his release – expected to walk free two days later.
It was Nirmala, not any male relative, who had spent months navigating lawyers, court dates, and bail paperwork to bring her son home. While she was completing the final steps nearby, gunfire broke out. “In our hearts, we thought he must be hiding in a corner somewhere,” she said of the chaos that followed.
The truth reached her that evening not through any official channel, but through a video clip circulating on a mobile phone, which showed her son walking towards the prison’s front gate to see what was happening before he was shot.
Family members later observed gunshot wounds near his abdomen and lower back. As with the other families, no formal notification of his death was ever issued, and no death certificate has yet been received. A mother who had spent months fighting to bring her son home instead buried him.
A pattern the women recognise
None of the three women interviewed had received a visit from any official after their relative’s death. In each case, it was a woman who was left to identify the body, a woman who absorbed the debt, and a woman who now represents the family in a court process that, by their account, treats them less as grieving relatives than as an inconvenience to be processed quickly.
Parivartan Executive Director, Attorney-at-Law Radika Gunaratne has studied conditions inside the Negombo Prison directly, and was direct about how gendered the fallout of custodial deaths is.
“When men remain inside for years, their dependents – in traditional families, the male is usually the primary earner – especially their wives and those with less power, all become victims,” she said. “When that man is lost, these families drop into an extreme level of vulnerability.”
She described overcrowding itself as a crisis that was frequently misread by the public as simply reflecting “an increase in drug users,” obscuring both the scale of the problem – prisons run, by her estimate, at four to five times intended capacity – and who actually absorbed its human cost once something went wrong inside.
“We conducted a study at the Negombo Prison about two months before this incident,” she said. “There are severe overcrowding issues and resources inside are extremely scarce.”
On the legal mechanics that keep men in remand for months awaiting a Government Analyst’s report under Section 54, Gunaratne said: “Delays in Government Analyst reports are a systemic problem across all criminal cases in Sri Lanka. Without creating a mechanism to expedite these reports, we are simply filling up the prisons.”
She added that Police officers, in her view, “frequently misuse or threaten individuals with Section 54 charges during unrelated disputes or out of revenge”. Charges that, once laid, can keep a family’s sole earner in remand for the better part of a year before any court has determined guilt.
Gunaratne was equally direct about what remand is supposed to be. “Under the law, a person is placed in remand custody to be protected – to safeguard their body and produce them safely for trial. That is the correct legal framework,” she said. “Until conviction, there is a presumption of innocence. So many remain as suspects while trials drag on for years – and how many of them are ultimately acquitted by the courts?”
On institutional rehabilitation for drug dependency, she said that officers themselves privately acknowledged its failure. “There is no effective rehabilitation for drug addiction inside. Inmates are just waiting for their court dates to get out and there is no organised structure to rehabilitate them.” A failure that, she argued, simply deferred the cost of addiction onto the same families, and disproportionately onto the same women, again and again.
Asked what the State owed these families, Gunaratne said it “bears a very high responsibility towards the dependents to build a proper structured programme”. However, she noted that existing welfare support for female-headed households in Sri Lanka remained “extremely scattered and uncoordinated,” with no mechanism for officials to proactively identify and assist women in exactly the position Chandani, Sriyani, and Nirmala now find themselves in.
“State officials should proactively reach out to these vulnerable families,” she said. “But currently, no such mechanism exists.”
The numbers behind the backlog
The scale of the bottleneck Gunaratne described is borne out in official figures.
The Auditor General’s 2024 audit found the Government Analyst’s Department ended the year with 30,220 case materials still awaiting analysis. Its Forensic Science Section alone received 44,172 new submissions during the year against capacity to clear 33,446, leaving 26,963 pending, of which 4,028, or 13% of the total backlog, dated back as far as 2017.
Many relatives of inmates gathered outside stated that their loved ones were held under Section 54 of the Poisons, Opium, and Dangerous Drugs Ordinance.
Under Section 54, Magistrate’s Courts cannot grant bail for severe drug offences, requiring suspects to apply to the High Court, or the Court of Appeal if the substance exceeds 10 grammes. Crucially, these cases require a Government Analyst’s report to confirm the substance type and weight. Although the law limits remand custody pending trial or scientific reporting to 12 months, delays in issuing these reports frequently leave suspects stranded in remand for up to a year.
Committee for Protecting Rights of Prisoners Chairman Senaka Perera told The Sunday Morning that around 65% of Sri Lanka’s prison population was linked to drug offences, arguing that most should be directed towards medical treatment rather than incarceration.
“There are people who remain in remand simply waiting for the Government Analyst’s report,” he said. “Sometimes the delay is not because of anything the accused has done, but because the report required for the case has not reached court.”
Govt. response
Justice and National Integration Minister Harshana Nanayakkara has acknowledged the delays as a driving factor behind the unrest, telling media that the Government Analyst’s Department had 118 unfilled vacancies that slowed the issuance of reports, in some cases keeping inmates in remand for close to a year.
He said that around 70 additional staff had since been recruited and new analysis equipment introduced, with the department’s monthly output expected to rise to between 7,500 and 9,000 reports; officials say daily output already stands at 400 to 500 reports.
The Minister also stated that Cabinet would be asked to approve legal amendments restoring High Court bail eligibility for certain drug offences currently routed through the Court of Appeal, adding that nationally some 23,000 prisoners remained in remand on drug charges pending analyst reports.
Meanwhile, the Department of Prisons says it is compiling information on the children of inmates who died in the unrest in order to arrange welfare support.
Prisons Spokesperson Commissioner Senaka Palletenna told The Sunday Morning that the department was still in the process of collecting this information and that further action would be announced once the task was complete. Several of the families interviewed for this article, however, said that they had not yet received any communication from the department at all.
To date, the Prisons Department has not responded to the allegations of torture and ill treatment of the inmates.
Left to carry it alone
Sri Lanka’s justice system presumes innocence until conviction. For the women left behind, that presumption has offered little comfort. The deaths of husbands and sons who had previously struggled with addiction have not been treated, in their experience, as deaths that required answers, or as losses that entitled their families to basic dignity.
Society does not look at them with empathy. To many, they are simply women who failed to show their sons/husbands the right path. They first became victims with the drug use of their sons and husbands; now, they are victims again, as the State, which was meant to protect the vulnerable, has failed them.
Sitting in her home in Minuwangoda, still without a death certificate for her son, Sriyani put it simply: “Even if a parent beats a child, the parent will go to prison. No one can beat and kill another person; it is illegal. Then why does no one care about justice for my son’s death? It is true that he used drugs. I don’t deny it or justify it. But did he deserve to be beaten to death? How can anyone possibly justify this?”