From Sri Lanka and India to the US via Ecuador

Authorities in Ecuador last Thursday arrested six people allegedly involved in smuggling immigrants from Sri Lanka and India into the USA through the South American country.

The Sri Lankan newspaper ‘Ada Derana’ reported on Friday that the people arrested in the Ecuadorian port of Guayaquil included two Indians and two members of the South American country’s immigration police.

“They brought people from Sri Lanka and India and put them up in hotels,” said Guayaquil police chief General Patricio Pazmino.

Ecuador’s Deputy Interior Minister Xavier Cordoba said $5,000 per person was charged by the immigrant smugglers. After entering Ecuador illegally, the migrants would be sent to a country in Central America from where they were sent to the United States.

The arrests were made after a two-month investigation. Documents, laptops and about $100,000 in cash were seized, police said.

Mom shoves 3 kids into well, then jumps

A mentally unstable mother shoved her three children into a well in Thandikulam, Vavuniya in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province and then threw herself in at around 8.30am on May 17, Vavuniya police said.

The ‘Divaina’ newspaper reported that villagers rescued the woman but the children, identified as  Ladurshika (6), Sudarshika (2 ½) and Samshika (1 ½), had died in the well.

The woman, 34, has been admitted to a Vavuniya hospital, police said.
 
According to the people of Thandikulam village, the woman lived separately from her husband who visited her occasionally.