By Roy Denish
A web of lies, stolen millions and a brutal murder came crashing down when the man known as the “Kurunegala Casanova” was tracked across Sri Lanka and arrested while allegedly attempting to flee to India, exposing one of the country’s most disturbing romance fraud operations.
A hustler, known as Kurunagela Casanova, who paraded the streets of the country masquerading as a well-to-do software engineer to prey on professional lonley women to trick them to hand over their fortune was busted in a transit bus enroute to Jaffna with elaborate plans to escape to India.
The high-stakes highway interception on Thursday night brought a dramatic end to a nationwide manhunt. Detectives with the Walana Central Anti-Vice Striking Unit, utilizing real-time GPS tracking and cell tower triangulation, cornered a commercial transit bus moving through the Kaithady area of Chavakachcheri. Inside, officers arrested 43-year-old Jayasundara Mudiyanselage Champika Sriyan Jayasundara, a native of Narammala who had eluded local authorities for months behind a trail of stolen millions and broken lives.
Taken into custody alongside Jayasundara were his 35-year-old legal wife and their young child. While law enforcement has yet to formally release the wife’s name pending formal charges, investigators allege she was no passive bystander. Instead, police paint her as the operational mastermind behind the curtain, eloquently engineering the intricate blueprints for her husband’s lethal romantic grifts. The illicit enterprise funded a flashy, high-rolling lifestyle for the family, bankrolled entirely by the life savings of the women Jayasundara targeted.
The meticulously constructed facade collapsed into a homicide investigation following the brutal killing of 33-year-old Rathnayake Pathiranage Shyama Darshani, a respected physiotherapist at Ampara Hospital. A forensic post-mortem examination performed by a judicial medical officer confirmed Darshani died of asphyxiation, strangled with a piece of cloth or rope inside a rented lodge in the resort town of Nuwara Eliya.
According to lead investigators, Darshani had been completely swindled by the suspect, who approached her under the alias Dineth Dissanayake. Believing his promise of marriage and a new life in Canada, she secured extensive bank loans, ultimately handing over approximately 15 million rupees to a man she believed was a wealthy tech executive.
The moments following the murder revealed a panicked, unravelling predator. Police reports indicate that after strangling Darshani, Jayasundara drove aimlessly through the streets of Nuwara Eliya before seeking refuge with a 49-year-old driver attached to the Kundasale Pradeshiya Sabha. The municipal employee allegedly provided the killer with temporary shelter and a logistics lifeline. Hours later, in a macabre attempt to dispose of the evidence, Jayasundara propped Darshani’s fully-clothed, lifeless body into the front passenger seat of his vehicle, driving through the night to Teldeniya where he abandoned her in the local hospital parking lot.
The Morning Telegraph has learned that Jayasundara actively employed counter-surveillance tactics during his flight from justice, rotating through a collection of burner phones to mask his location from regional cell towers. The cat-and-mouse game ended when the suspect breached his own operational security, powering on his personal mobile device to place a call to his immediate family. That single signal gave digital investigators the precise coordinates needed to deploy tactical units for the highway bust.
The arrest has systematically stripped away a persona built on custom wigs, false identities, and fabricated corporate prestige. In reality, police records show Jayasundara’s technical background was limited to a stint as a low-level clerk at a neighborhood communication center, where his daily routine consisted of running basic errands and acting as a handyman assisting walk-in clients with photocopies.
Jayasundara now faces formal murder charges alongside a mountain of pending corporate fraud, vehicle theft, and counterfeit foreign employment indictments across the Gampaha, Aluthkade, Tissamaharama, Kaduwela, and Horana Magistrate Courts.
