Sri Lankan police have arrested three men in connection with the killing of Sinhala nationalist activist Dan Priyasad, including a former soldier suspected of carrying out the shooting.
The arrests were made at a rented house in Ranwala, where officers also recovered 12,400 sticks of cigarettes, five elephant pearls and quantities of narcotics.
Police said the suspects, aged between 39 and 55 and from Kegalle and Welioya, include a former soldier who had not been legally discharged from the military. He is suspected of being the gunman who fatally shot Priyasad and of involvement in a separate shooting attempt in Mahabage last year.
Priyasad, who led the “Nawa Sinhale National Movement” and was affiliated with the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), was shot dead at the Laksanda Sevana Housing Complex in Wellampitiya on 22 April. The 39-year-old was struck multiple times in the chest and shoulders by two gunmen who escaped on a motorcycle. He died in hospital the following morning.
His rise to prominence came in the aftermath of the Mullivaikkal genocide in 2009, when he used Facebook to spread anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim rhetoric under the banner of “protecting the nation”. He later launched a more organised Sinhala nationalist campaign that gained him notoriety.
At least three suspects have now been taken into custody as investigations into the killing continue.
In 2016, Priyasad referred to himself as the “Saviour of the Sinhalese” and threatened to carry out a suicide bombing to eliminate Muslims in Sri Lanka when speaking at a protest at Fort Railway Station. The police arrested him following complaints made by several parliamentarians for the police to take action against him.
In 2017, Priyasad was named by the Centre for Human Rights and Research (CHR) in a complaint to the Ministry of Order as one of the key men that led the Sinhalese mob in storming a United Nations safehouse where 31 Rohingya refugees were being sheltered. He was noted as a “Sinhala extremist” and acted in violation of the court- imposed sanctions that were placed on him following his previous arrest in 2016 for threatening to bomb Muslims in Sri Lanka. The report by Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka read;
“CHR has also brought to the notice of the Law and Order Ministry that one of the men leading the mob was in violation of strict bail conditions. JDS has seen a copy of a complaint made by Attorney at law Nizam Shainaz, which shows that Sinhala extremist Dan Priyasad has violated sanctions imposed by courts in December 2016 when he was released after police arrested him for mob violence."
In the aftermath of the 2019 Easter Sunday Bombings, anti-Muslim violence, discrimination and harassment carried out by Sinhalese mobs ran rampant across the island. Navin Dissanayake, the Minister of Plantation Industries at the time, said that “hard- line Buddhists” were responsible for the “organised” and “systematic” attacks on Muslim-owned businesses and homes. He named Dan Priyasad, along with two other Sinhala nationalists, as leaders of “extremist Buddhist” organizations and those responsible for inciting riots and anti-Muslim sentiment.
In response to the Aragalaya movement in April 2022 against the Sri Lankan government, a pro-government march was held by then- president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s supporters and Sinhala Buddhist monks. During the march, Priyasad warned that they had “collected the details of all engaging in protests” and threatened that severe action would be taken against them. On 9th May 2022, he was arrested for attacking peaceful protesters and was briefly held in further remand for breaching his former bail conditions on multiple occasions.
Priyasad’s assassination in a public shooting incident is one among a series of recent killings that reflect a spike in violent crime across the South this year.
