Tri-forces join fight against drugs

Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Ravindra Wijegunaratne together with tri-forces commanders at the press conference yesterday – Pic by Pradeep Pathirana

• Army, Navy and Air Force to support Police to step up drug raids countrywide

By Shanika Sriyananda

Following directives from President Maithripala Sirisena, the tri-forces have joined the Sri Lanka Police and the Special Task Force (STF) to aid in fighting drug smuggling.

At a joint media briefing yesterday, Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Admiral Ravindra Wijegunaratne said that the tri-forces were fully geared to assist the Government’s initiative to control the drug menace in Sri Lanka, which had shown an alarming increase during the past few years.

“Internationally it was found that Sri Lanka has become a transit centre for dangerous drugs but we have no proof that the drugs that are smuggled into the country, mainly through sea routes, are smuggled out of the country,” he said.

CDS said that the Sri Lanka Navy (SLN) like other navies in the world has jurisdiction only for 12 km from land and smugglers mostly exchange drug loads beyond this maritime jurisdiction, where SLN has no legal authority to arrest them.

“We are now aware that massive drugs stocks are smuggled into the country from Afghanistan which has two routes – the African route and the Southern route – via which they send drugs to Sri Lanka.

Army Commander Lt. Gen. Mahesh Senanayake, explaining the measures taken to assist the ongoing operations to make the country free of drugs, said that the Army was sharing important information with the Police Narcotic Bureau (PNB), the STF and the Excise Department to nab drug dealers, who use an islandwide network to smuggle drugs including narcotics, illicit cigarettes, and ganja.

“We have commenced awareness programs on drug prevention for people at the grass root level and also for soldiers,” he said, adding that the SLA assists the Government to rehabilitate drug addicts in Army-run rehabilitation centres in Kandakadu and Senapura.

Highlighting the measures taken by the Sri Lanka Navy, Navy Chief Vice Admiral Piyal de Silva requested people, including parents, to be vigilant and protect children and the youth from getting addicted to drugs to reduce the demand.

“Navy vessels in the high seas use intelligence information shared by the other law enforcement authorities to monitor suspected behaviour of fishing vessels and the surveillance system of the SLN has helped to take massive quantities of drugs into custody. During the last five months, SLN has been able to take over 1,000 kilograms of heroin into our custody and the Police and the Excise Department assisted us significantly to prevent these stocks going into the market,” he said.

Vice Admiral de Silva said that some smugglers use different operations to mislead the authorities but SLN was vigilant in this regard. “The SLN has nabbed 168 people smuggling drugs into the country in 2017, 88 in 2018 and 27 in 2019. The smugglers are exploiting fishermen to smuggle drugs,” he said.

The SLN Chief revealed that an SLN officer would be deployed in the Combined Maritime Force (CMF) in Bahrain, which has 33 member states.

“The officer has been trained and the CMF has given its approval to deploy the officer and we are awaiting some clearance to station him there,” he said.

Air Force Commander Air Vice Marshal Kapila Jayampathy said that SLAF intelligence information on people who distribute drugs, have stocks, and transport drugs would be shared with the other law enforcement authorities and the military to destroy the drug smuggling network.

“We also use drone technology to detect the places where they grow ganja,” he said.