Police investigating Saturday’s killing of senior Sri Lankan military intelligence officer have revealed that the shots were fired by a person who was travelling with him at the time of the killing.



Lt. Colonel Rizvi Meedin, who reportedly commanded the army’s intelligence unit in Colombo, was found shot dead inside his official vehicle near his home in the Kiribathgoda housing scheme area on Saturday night.



‘The officer had gone out in the night for some work and his wife got a call around midnight with the caller telling her that her husband has been shot,’ Army spokesman Brig Nalin Witharanage said.



Lt. Col. Meedin was found in the driver seat of his car with bullet wounds on his head and neck and was pronounced dead at hospital, he said.



He is the second high-ranking military intelligence killed this year and, as in the previous assassination five months ago of another military intelligence commander Lt. Col. Nizam Muthaliff, the Liberation Tigers are suspected.



But Police say they believe Lt. Col. Meedin’s assassin was a close associate of the officer and Sinhalese.



Police are looking at individuals in Sri Lanka’s notoriously violent underworld for the killers of both officers, press reports said this week.



The Daily Mirror said Tuesday police had arrested underworld figure Chamila Roshan alias Chammi in connection with the killing.



A senior police official told the paper Chamila was believed to have enticed Colonel Meedin out of his house before setting him up for the killing by Ice Manju, a Trincomalee based underworld leader ‘with links to the LTTE,’