A lesson for cops

Thursday 20th March, 2025

The police have found their ‘head’ at long last, but they’ve lost face. Their much-publicised manhunt for IGP Deshabandu Tennakoon came a cropper. Having been in hiding for 20 days, he surrendered to the Matara Magistrate’s court yesterday and was remanded.

The government sought to save face by claiming, in Parliament, yesterday that Tennakoon had surrendered while a CID team was in Matara to obtain a court order to freeze his assets. It also said the CID had conducted a thorough search of his house the previous day and taken into custody a large number of bottles of liquor, a small firearm, and two mobile phones. It would have the public believe that such actions scared Tennakoon into giving himself up. However, there is reason to believe that Tennakoon surrendered because his last-ditch attempt to have the arrest warrant for him stayed by the Court of Appeal failed.

It is now up to the CID to ascertain from Tennakoon where he was hiding and who helped him evade arrest for almost three weeks. The act of aiding and abetting the evasion of arrest is a punishable offence, as is public knowledge. The police are known to arrest the family members of the suspects they fail to arrest. One may recall that they took into custody the mother and another family member of Ishara Sewwandi, an accomplice of the killer of Gannemulle Sanjeewa. Acting on a tip-off, they arrested the shooter within a few hours of the incident, but Sewwandi has been on the run since 19 Feb., and the search for her has drawn a blank.

Tennakoon’s illegal behaviour has been a black mark on the police, who have also blotted their copybook by failing to arrest him. How can they be expected to catch the masterminds behind serious crimes, such as terror attacks?

In 2024, the then President Ranil Wickremesinghe appointed Tennakoon IGP amidst protests. His action made the SLPP-UNP government even more unpopular, and it is believed that the previous administration launched Operation Yukthiya against the underworld in a bid to shore up its crumbling image and justify Tennakoon’s appointment as IGP. There were many complaints of police excesses and fundamental rights violations during that operation. However, there was a pressing need for an all-out effort to neutralise the criminal gangs engaged in drug trafficking, contract killing, armed robberies, etc., but Yukthiya became a kind of political circus. There has been a steep rise in underworld activities since last year’s regime change. Hardly a day passes without a fatal shooting somewhere, but the police are doing precious little to stem the crime wave.

Tennakoon should not have been appointed IGP, but the previous regime needed someone who was willing to do its bidding unquestioningly. There were serious allegations against him including wrongful arrests, obstructing police investigations, failure to prevent the Easter Sunday terror attacks, threatening journalists, and attacking protesters. Above all, in December 2023, the Supreme Court, in a historic judgement, held Tennakoon responsible for torture. Not even that apex court judgement deterred the SLPP-UNP government from making Tennakoon the police chief.

There are lessons that the current police top brass should learn from their predecessors’ mistakes, especially those of Tennakoon. Unless they refrain from compromising their professional integrity to commit excesses and/or do politicians’ dirty work, they, too, will face the same fate as Tennakoon.