On the night of 10 May 2022, a fourteen-year-old boy was brought to Sri Sambuddha Walukarama Temple in Thalakolawawa, in Sri Lanka's Anuradhapura district, to be ordained as a novice monk. He was handed over by another monk for the ordination. That same night, the temple's chief incumbent, Mulleriyawa Wimalatissa, sexually abused him. The boy fled the temple the following morning and was found by police from the Thambuttegama station.
The Anuradhapura Special High Court for Child Crimes, under Judge Sandun Withana, convicted the 65-year-old Wimalatissa on three charges relating to the abuse on 29 May 2026. The court sentenced him to a total of thirty years' rigorous imprisonment across the three counts, running concurrently, along with fines and an order to pay the victim five hundred thousand rupees in compensation. Wimalatissa's defence counsel submitted medical reports describing the defendant's various illnesses, and the court, taking his health into account, structured the sentence so that he would serve an effective ten years.
No public denial or defence account of the events themselves is recorded in the sources consulted for this article; the defence's submissions to the court concerned sentencing rather than guilt. Wimalatissa's case was decided at trial level only; no appeal is recorded as of this writing. It is one of a rising number of prosecutions of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka in recent years, a pattern this atlas records separately from this individual case.