Yoshitha Rajapaksa, the second son of former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa, was arrested on Wednesday by the Commission to Investigate Allegations of Bribery or Corruption (CIABOC), over his recruitment to the Sri Lanka Navy and the funding of his training at Britain's Royal Naval Academy.
He appeared before the commission on 17 June in response to a summons, having told investigators that he could not attend the previous day because of a separate Court of Appeal hearing. After questioning, officials placed the former navy lieutenant, who enlisted in December 2006, under arrest.
According to findings cited by the commission, the then navy commander, Wasantha Karannagoda, wrote to the Royal Naval Academy in September 2006 seeking a placement for Rajapaksa. The academy responded in November, indicating that admission could be arranged but would not be offered on a full scholarship and would require payment.
Investigators have also scrutinised the circumstances of Rajapaksa's recruitment itself. The commission states that the standard eligibility criteria for cadet officer appointments required candidates to have completed Advanced Level studies in the science or mathematics streams, whereas Rajapaksa had studied in the arts stream. It alleges that the criteria were subsequently revised and fresh advertisements issued in a manner that enabled his appointment, and that concerns raised over his Ordinary Level qualifications were later resolved through amendments that corresponded to his academic record.
Rajapaksa travelled to the United Kingdom in January 2007 and trained at the Royal Naval Academy for more than eighteen months, with the costs reportedly borne by the Sri Lankan government.
The commander who arranged the placement would himself go on to become one of the most prominent Sri Lankan officers to evade accountability for wartime atrocities. Karannagoda was named as the fourteenth suspect in the "Navy 11" case, over the abduction, torture and presumed murder of eleven youths, most of them Tamil, who were seized for ransom between 2008 and 2009 and held at naval bases in Trincomalee and Colombo. Charges against him were dropped by the Attorney General in 2021, drawing condemnation from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and Amnesty International, after which he was appointed governor of the North Western Province by then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa. In March 2025 the United Kingdom sanctioned him for gross human rights violations.
The corruption inquiry proceeds even as the graver crimes of the Rajapaksa era remain unpunished. Mahinda Rajapaksa's presidency oversaw the 2009 Mullivaikkal genocide, in which tens of thousands of Tamils were killed, yet neither he nor the senior military figures who served under him have been prosecuted for the atrocities of the war.