Sri Lanka, July 25 -- Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala told Parliament yesterday that the deadly Negombo Prison is a result of a direct counter-reaction or conspiracy engineered by underworld cartels against the state's aggressive anti-drug and anti-crime crackdown.

He noted that the administration will not back away from its anti-drug campaign despite opposition criticism, emphasising that political patronage for the drug trade has been dismantled.

The violence initially flared when drug-trafficking inmates retaliated against other prisoners who had leaked information to prison authorities regarding a major drug-smuggling attempt into the facility.

Therefore, the Negombo prison incident is not an isolated event and therefore ...