A woman selling ‘wadey’ on the roadside for a living in the Ibbagamuwa area was robbed of her daily wage when two men in a three-wheeler snatched the tin in which she put her daily collection to. The victim of the incident happened to 57-year-old H. M. Hemathilaka, a resident of Gokarella, Godgama. She made a living through the selling of wadey in a makeshift hut on the Kurunegala-Dambulla main road, on the outskirts of Ibbagamuwa town.
In addition to selling wadey, she also earned a meagre living through the sale of rubber slippers.
“At around 12.30 in the afternoon, two men in a three-wheeler, stopped before my shop. They asked me if I could give them wadey for Rs 100.
But I told them that I didn’t have so many wadey to sell at the moment but if they could wait a bit, I could make them some more. One of them agreed to it and he got off the three-wheeler and came and sat inside the shop. The other man turned the three-wheel around and went away.
As the oil heated up, I came to the front to check on how many wadeys I had prepared to make and as I was counting the wadey, my back towards the road, I heard the sound of loose coins being dropped from within the shop.
When I raised my head to look, I saw the man inside the shop, near the cash tin.
When I came running inside, the man ran away with the money in hand, at the same time, the three-wheel that left came speeding by and those two escaped with the money. I ran, screaming after them but I could not catch them.
That tin had around Rs.15,000 in cash- that was money I had collected for the past few days, through the sale of wadey and slippers,” Hemathilaka said relating her tale of woe.
Hemathilaka further lamented that the money in her tin had been to repay her loans to the businessman from whom she was getting her slipper for sale and that she now faced a great problem in repaying her loan to him.
Area residents state that a large number of youth in the Ibbagamuwa area have been addicted to drugs and drug related crimes have been on the rise in the area.
They suspect that this crime too might have been committed by drug addicts in the area.
The robbery had been recorded in a CCTV camera in a shop nearby and the police hope to apprehend the suspects through investigations into the footage.