Drug-smuggling feud sparks deadly prison riot in Sri Lanka

A drug-smuggling dispute inside Sri Lanka’s Negombo prison left 26 people dead and dozens injured after two groups of inmates turned a contraband fight into one of the country’s deadliest prison riots in years. Seven prison officials were among the dead as the violence tore through the facility in the coastal town about 35 kilometers north of Colombo.

Justice and National Integration Minister Harshana Nanayakkara said the clash began after one group of prisoners passed information to prison officials about attempts to smuggle drugs into the jail, enraging another faction tied to the smuggling network. The fighting spread over two days and exposed how deeply criminal activity had penetrated the prison’s internal order. Investigators were still trying to determine how inmates obtained weapons and how the prison’s CCTV cameras were disabled.

The violence also laid bare the scale of Negombo’s overcrowding. The prison was built for roughly 650 people but was holding about 2,400 inmates, according to the Committee for Protecting Rights of Prisoners. That mismatch made the jail far harder to control once the confrontation began, with prisoners attacking officials with bricks and poles and guards firing in self-defense.

By Tuesday morning, authorities had moved as many as 734 prisoners to four other prisons in an effort to relieve pressure and restore order. About 100 injured inmates and prison staff were treated in hospital, while military personnel with armored vehicles remained outside the facility on guard duty as the government worked to stabilize the situation.

The riot added to a long record of violent unrest in Sri Lanka’s prisons, where overcrowding, gang activity and weak security have repeatedly produced deadly outbreaks. The prison department said earlier clashes in 2020 and 2012 left 11 and 27 people dead, underscoring that the failures behind the Negombo riot were longstanding rather than isolated.

The episode now puts the focus on what prison officials knew about contraband networks before the violence broke out, and why surveillance, searches and internal controls failed to contain them. In a system strained by overcrowding and persistent criminal influence, the riot showed how quickly a drug dispute behind bars can become a mass-casualty event.