Indictment on Avant-Garde case to be served on Sep. 27

Indictments in the Avant-Garde high seas arms trafficking case are to be served on the accused by the High Court Trial-at-Bar on September 27, the Attorney General’s Department said.

Meanwhile the Colombo High Court Trial-at-Bar has issued notice on the 13 defendants in the case including Avant-Garde Chairman Nissanka Yapa Senadhipathi to appear before the court on September 27.

The Attorney General had filed indictment comprising 7,573 charges in Avant-Garde arms trafficking case against Chairman of Avant-Garde Nissanka Yapa Senadhipathi and the other defendants.

The indictment was filed before the Trial-at-Bar in Colombo High Court.

The 7,573 charges including unlawful possession of automatic firearms and live ammunition rounds laid against Chairman of Avant-Garde, Nissanka Yapa Senadhipathi, former Rakna Lanka Chairman Major General (Rtd.) Waduge Palitha Piyasiri Fernando, former Rakna Lanka CEO Major General (Rtd.) Karunaratna Banda Adhikari Egodawele, former Senior Additional Secretary of Ministry of Defence Saman Dissanayake, Ukrainian captain of MV Avant-Garde Gennadiy Gavrylov, former Chairman of Rakna Lanka Victor Samaraweera, former Senior Assistant Secretary to Defence Ministry Sujatha Damayanthi Jayaratne, Rakna Lanka representative in MV Avant Garde Don Albert Thilakaratne, Commodore (Rtd.) Vishvajith Nandana Diyabalanage of Avant-Garde Maritime Services, General Manager of Rakna Lanka’s Ocean Security Unit Ponnuthurai Balasundaram Premachandra and Avant-Garde representative in MV Avant Garde Nilupul de Costa.

The Avant-Garde Maritime Services (Pvt) Limited and Rakna Arakshaka Lanka Limited have also been listed as the defendants in the case.

This is considered to be the lawsuit in which an Attorney General laid the highest number of charges against the defendants, in the judicial history of Sri Lanka.