The International Cricket Council agreed to compensate Sri Lankan cricketer Kusal Janith Perera for the suspension imposed on him on doping charges, Sri Lanka Cricket said today.

Perera was cleared in early May this year by the ICC, stating that the suspension will immediately be lifted.

He was provisionally suspended in December last year when a Qatar-based testing facility found 19-Norandrostenedione - a banned substance - in a sample obtained from Perera in October the same year.

Perera's legal team challenged the finding, arguing that "the Qatar laboratory might have misidentified impurities in the samples as 19-Norandrostenedione, given the very low concentrations of that substance found in the samples."

In response, the ICC said it hired an independent expert to review all of the Qatar laboratory's findings. Though the expert concluded the lab had correctly identified the substance in the samples, the expert's view was that the lab's finding was not sustainable. This was because, "for various scientific and technical reasons, it could not be ruled out that the 19-Norandrostenedione was produced naturally in the player's body and/or formed in the samples after the player provided them."

The ICC then relayed these concerns to the lab, which had "withdrawn the Adverse Analytical Finding and is instead reporting an Atypical Finding."