The Hon. Chamara Sampath Dasanayake
Chamara Sampath Dasanayake objected to the Minister of Public Security’s characterization of the assassination of Weligama Pradeshiya Sabha Chairman Lasantha Wickramasekara as an underworld-related killing. He argued that the deceased should not be labelled before the investigation is completed and urged the Minister to focus on arresting the gunman and identifying those responsible. He said any conclusion about an underworld link should follow evidence from the investigation, not precede it.
Verbatim record (translated)
Machine-translated from Sinhala / Tamil / English¶ 01 [12.10 p.m.]
¶ 02 Hon. Deputy Speaker, following the statement of the Minister of Public Security, I wish to respond. Yesterday, the Hon. Minister, in speaking about the assassination of the Chairman of the Weligama Pradeshiya Sabha, immediately cast the deceased—Lasantha Wickramasekara—into an underworld frame, characterizing the killing as an underworld matter.
¶ 03 A man elected by the people, serving as Chairman, was shot dead. It is wrong to rush to label him and thereby prejudice the case. The Minister’s responsibility is to apprehend the killer and reveal the culprits to the country. Do not use the death to make political insinuations about the deceased and his family.
¶ 04 I challenge the Minister: arrest the gunman who killed the Chairman of the Weligama Pradeshiya Sabha. If the killer says it was an underworld incident, we will accept it then. But do not first politicize the matter and paint the deceased as underworld.
Provenance
- Source
- Hansard, Thursday, 23 October 2025 ·No. 22641 ·English daily/uncorrected Hansard
- Page · column
- not yet extracted — page/column anchors are not in the current dataset; the source PDF is the citable location.
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/lk/speeches/7938
Cite as: The Hon. Chamara Sampath Dasanayake. 10th Parliament, Parliament of Sri Lanka. Hansard, 23 October 2025. No. 22641. Politick, https://staging.politick.io/lk/speeches/7938