COLOMBO: Sri Lankan police were searching for their chief on Sunday after a court order for his arrest was issued over the killing of an officer during a botched raid, an official said.<\/p>\n
Inspector-General of Police Deshabandu Tennakoon has been missing since a magistrate in the island\u2019s south ordered his arrest on Friday, following allegations that he had ordered the raid on Dec. 31, 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went to his home to carry out the arrest warrant but he had gone into hiding, leaving behind his bodyguards,\u201d a senior officer said.<\/p>\n
He said the court had also imposed a foreign travel ban on Tennakoon, 53, to stop him from leaving the island.<\/p>\n
Tennakoon ordered a unit from Colombo to search a hotel in Weligama, a resort town about 150 kilometers south of the capital, for illegal drugs.<\/p>\n
Local police, unaware of the undercover operation, confronted the unit from the capital, sparking a gunbattle in which one officer was killed and another critically wounded. No drugs were found at the hotel.<\/p>\n
Tennakoon was controversially named as police chief in November 2023 but his appointment was challenged in the Supreme Court, which suspended him in July pending the completion of a hearing.<\/p>\n
He was given the top job despite the highest court finding in a separate case that he had tortured a suspect.<\/p>\n
The court had ordered Tennakoon to pay half a million rupees ($1,600) to the victim but the government at the time ignored judicial orders to take disciplinary action against him.<\/p>\n
Separately, Sri Lanka\u2019s leftist president recently received a boost from Washington, with the International Monetary Fund greenlighting a roughly $330 million payout under an existing loan agreement.<\/p>\n
The IMF board approved the latest review of an existing four-year loan agreement, noting in a statement that Sri Lanka\u2019s program performance \u201chas been strong,\u201d and that almost all quantitative targets had been met.<\/p>\n
The board\u2019s approval gives Sri Lanka \u201cimmediate access\u201d to around $334 million to support its economic policies and reform program, the IMF said, and follows an earlier staff level agreement struck with the Sri Lankan authorities.<\/p>\n
\u201cReforms in Sri Lanka are bearing fruit and the economic recovery has been remarkable,\u201d IMF deputy managing director Kenji Okamura said in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
COLOMBO: Sri Lankan police were searching for their chief on Sunday after a court order for his arrest was issued over the killing of an officer during a botched raid, an official said. Inspector-General of Police Deshabandu Tennakoon has been missing since a magistrate in the island\u2019s south ordered his arrest on Friday, following allegations …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77840"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77855,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77840\/revisions\/77855"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}