Suspect who shot cop dead named as autistic recluse
Sergeant’s old rugby club line up to honour fallen hero
THE man accused of shooting dead a sergeant in a police station is an autistic recluse from a Sri Lankan family, it emerged yesterday.
Louis De Zoysa, 23, was named as the alleged gunman suspected of fatally wounding Sergeant Matiu Ratana, 54, after smuggling a revolver into a custody area.
Yesterday police searched the London home of the son of a Green Party campaigner and former yoga teacher. Detectives arrested a second man in Norwich on suspicion of supplying the murder weapon as officers probed possible links to gang violence.
Armed officers also raided a former ammunition depot in Surrey as they sought to discover where the suspect obtained the weapon used to carry out the killing last Friday.
Sgt Ratana bled to death after being shot in the heart at 2.15am as he was preparing to search a handcuffed suspect who had been arrested on suspicion of intent to supply drugs and possession of ammunition in Croydon, south London.
The suspect was in a holding cell when he is said to have reached into his trousers for the weapon and fired off five shots with his hands still cuffed behind his back, wounding himself in the process. Last night De Zoysa was in a critical condition with a neck injury in hospital after having to be revived by doctors over the weekend.
Neighbours around his family’s £700,000 terraced home in Norbury, south London, said the ‘awkward’ loner was autistic and suggested he had suffered from mental health issues which may have triggered a referral to Prevent – the Government’s deradicalisatiom programme for suspected extremists – in 2018.
He is understood to have lived at the house with his mother Elizabeth, a translator who ran as a Green candidate in local elections, and his Sri Lankan father Channa, a former yoga teacher said to be passionate about recycling who repairs bicycles for free. The Catholic couple, who run an events company, have five children.
Local residents said police were often seen at the address.
One said: ‘The police must have been to their house about a dozen times over the last three or four years. It’s common knowledge that he’s autistic and has learning difficulties and had mental health issues.
‘We would see him walk by now and then but he’d never say hello. I’ve watched their children grow up – they’ve been there about 25 to 30 years.
‘They were a tight-knit family who largely kept themselves to themselves.’ Armed police were
yesterday seen searching a farm property in the Banstead area of Surrey.
The 56-acre site was a former ammunitions dump in the Second World War. Neighbours told of hearing a loud explosion – described as ‘like a bomb going off’ – at 5.40am on Saturday when armed police carried out a controlled explosion as they entered one of the buildings on the site.
Residents said they had previously seen a number of young men going to the site at night. One added: ‘There was coming and goings late at night. It was a bit suspicious.’
Sgt Ratana was born in 1966 to a Scottish mother called Mary Young and a Mâori father and was the eldest child of an extended whânau (family) of stepbrothers and stepsisters.
It is believed he moved to the UK in 1989 to be closer to his mother before she died, having returned to Scotland years earlier.
The tragic policeman lived in Worthing with his partner Sue Bushby.