Don was living in city since 2018: Cops

COIMBATORE: The two-storeyed building painted in pale yellow and green colour is not very different from rest of the house of Balaji Nagar, a sparsely populated upcoming residential locality in Kalapatti on the periphery of Coimbatore.

Only that it was from this house

Sri Lankan

underworld don Maddumage Chandana Lasantha Perera alias Angoda Lokka was hiding and probably operating his network for the past five months.

Police say Lokka had come to Coimbatore in 2018 and started living in an apartment at Saravanampatti till he moved to this house in February this year.

For residents of Balaji Nagar where he lived, Angoda Lokka was as mysterious a figure as his death. Flaunting multiple gold chains, the Hindi speaking, Bullet-riding man who walked with a swag was always intriguing for the residents.

But Lokka seldom spoke to anyone other than asking for cigarettes at the corner provision shop or vegetables at grocery store. Residents say he will never speak to any of them but would be seen in the evenings feeding street dogs. Amani Dhanji, who was living with him too would not speak to anyone.

“He seemed to be a rich man. How can we pick a conversation with such affluent people,” asked the provision store owner behind his house.

For everyone he was Pradeep Singh, supplying protein supplements to gyms. Even when he fell unconscious on July 3, his unsuspecting

neighbours

summoned ambulance and sent him to the hospital. They had no inkling that he was a notorious gangster and it has come a rude shock to them. “The two never had any visitors in all these five months,’’ said a neighbour.

The owner of the rented house where Lokka lived is in America and his relative who lives in Coimbatore had rented out to Lokka. “I don’t want to talk about it,’’ said the relative when TOI spoke to her, apparently shocked at the developments.

Police said Lokka came to Chennai way back in 2017 in the height of gang war in Lanka and threat to his life mounted. He was also wanted by Lankan police for various offences including murders, extortion and drug running. It has come to light that Lokka was arrested in Chennai in 2017 for using a fake passport. “We have sought more details of the case,’’ a police officer said.

It was then that he obtained a fake Aadhar card with the help of Madurai-based lawyer Sivakami Sundari and her friend Dhayaneswaran from

Erode

. Police said Sundari’s father was a LTTE sympathizer.

“Sundari got a call from a person in Dubai, claiming to be her father’s friend. He asked her to help Lokka,’’ police said. Lokka then travelled to Madurai where he stayed at Sundari’s house for three months.

Sundari then approached her friend Dhayaneswaran who in turn helped get the Aadhar card with a Tirupur address, found the apartment at Saravanampatti and later the house at Kalapatti for Lokka. “Dhayaneswaran told the house owner that Lokka and Amani were couple from Dubai. They couldn’t travel because of lockdown and would stay for few months in Coimbatore,’’ police said.

Amani, apparently was widow of a man murdered by Lokka in Lanka. She had travelled thrice to India in the last three years to meet Lokka. Police say they do not suspect Amani’s connivance in her husband’s murder. “After the murder, Lokka forced her to be with him,’’ police said.

There were speculations that Amani had poisoned Lokka to death to avenge her husband’s murder. “But there is little to support the poisoning theory. Neighbours saw his unconscious body. There were no frothing or other symptoms of poisoning,’’ said a police officer adding that he was a chain smoker and cardiac arrest as said in postmortem was probable due to the habit.

Police have seized laptops, mobile phones and multiple Sim cards from them. Only after perusal of the call records we would know if Lokka was operating his drug business from here, say police.