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Security for White increased after Friday’s shooting incident
Security to Aliyantha White, a physican of President Mahinda Rajapaksa, has been increased after an assailant fired shots into his car on Friday, police said.
They said they were yet to trace the suspect who had blocked the car at Edirisinghe Road in Mirihana, Nugegoda, before firing three shots through the tinted rear windows. However, they said they were confident of making a breakthrough as they had obtained vital clues from two eyewitnesses and from forensic evidence at the scene of the crime.
Three police teams, including from the Colombo Crime Division and the Mirihana Special Investigation Division, are continuing the investigations.
Mr. White said yesterday it was by a quirk of fate that he had not been in the vehicle at the time. “I personally prepare the medicines of the President,” Dr White claimed. “I am not like a Western doctor who writes out a prescription and you go buy the medicines from a pharmacy. So I need security. For this reason, I was allocated four policemen. Now, I have been given two more.”
He said that what happened on Friday was still a mystery to him. “I don’t have enemies and my other businesses are run by my brothers. We don’t have problems. As for politics, I treat more opposition politicians than government politicians. They all love me and we meet often. It would have been a greater loss to them (Opposition) if something untoward had happened to me.”
He said there was no doubt that the attack targeting him was by someone who knew his routine. Mr. White said every month he held Bodhi pooja at the Bellanwila temple in the morning and on Friday he sent his driver in his car to his mother’s house, which was some 300 metres from his house, to bring him a white shirt. “It was then that the assailant had blocked the car and fired at it,” Mr. White said. “If I had also gone with him to pick up the t-shirt, I would have been harmed as I usually sit on the back seat.”
He also said that every day around 4.30 a.m., he visited a gym he had set up at his mother’s house but for the past week or so he missed this routine. “I suspect that someone had lain in wait all those days for my car. This was someone who knew my routine.”