-By LeN Legal Affairs Correspondent
(Lanka-e-News -17.May.2025, 9.40 PM) On Thursday, in the quiet chamber of the Colombo Magistrate’s Court, a gavel struck wood and twelve lives changed. Ten women and two men—Muslim suspects arrested in the murky aftermath of Sri Lanka’s 2019 Easter Sunday bombings—were formally released. They had already been granted bail months or even years earlier. Now, their legal ordeal is over, at least on paper.
Their arrest, detention, and years of legal limbo came at the behest of Sri Lanka’s Terrorism Investigation Division (TID), which, after five long years, admitted that its investigations were complete, and no further action would be pursued. The Attorney General had reviewed the files and decided not to proceed. The complaint would be closed.
For the suspects, this was a quiet legal vindication. For the Sri Lankan justice system, it was a thunderous indictment.
From the start, the Easter Sunday investigation has read like a script in a Kafka novel—interwoven with religious profiling, political interference, bogus expert testimony, and a state apparatus that seemed more interested in optics than justice.
The suspects released on May 16 were allegedly detained under the pretext of “aiding and abetting terrorism”—a legal charge often so broadly defined under Sri Lanka’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) that anything from lending a phone to renting a room could be construed as abetting mass murder.
According to sources close to the investigation, most of the suspects were devout Muslim women whose only connection to the accused bombers was through marriage, distant kinship, or shared places of worship. Their release now, after nearly half a decade, raises troubling questions: Why were they arrested in the first place? What was the basis of their detention? And more crucially, who benefitted from their prolonged incarceration?
Counsel for the suspects also requested—and was granted—the return of confiscated items such as mobile phones, laptops, and personal documents seized during their arrests. These items, held in state custody for years, had become evidence without a crime, proof without prosecution.
The case, as it now turns out, was not built on hard evidence or direct involvement. It was built on “intelligence inputs,” many of which, lawyers argue, originated from the now-discredited testimony of a so-called “counterterrorism expert” whose academic record is murkier than a Colombo monsoon.
Central to this story is a figure widely known among Colombo’s intelligence and security elite—a bald-headed man who paraded as a “Professor of Counterterrorism” with apparent international credentials and local media clout. For years, he was cited in government briefings, quoted in newspapers, and treated as an authority on Islamic extremism.
But like so many things in post-war Sri Lanka, it was all performance art.
Recent disclosures reveal that the “Professor” in question had never received a degree from a recognised Sri Lankan university. In fact, he had no verified academic background in security studies, intelligence, or Islamic theology. His claims to expertise were largely built on association with a particular think tank and his ties to certain military elements.
Yet his reports—and worse, his personal convictions—were taken as gospel. These reports formed the basis for a raft of arrests following the Easter attacks. Many of the individuals now released were detained on nothing more than circumstantial associations highlighted in his memos.
One defense lawyer summed it up succinctly in court: “My clients were victims of profiling, powered by pseudoscience and state paranoia.”
The Easter Sunday bombings of April 21, 2019, which killed over 260 people and injured hundreds more, were swiftly blamed on Islamic fundamentalist extremists, particularly the National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ) and its leader Zaharan Hashim. But over the years, multiple layers of doubt have formed around the official narrative.
A series of leaked testimonies, whistleblower reports, and investigative exposes have begun to suggest something more sinister: that the bombings were not simply the work of isolated fanatics, but were enabled—or at the very least, permitted—by individuals inside Sri Lanka’s own security establishment.
The name most frequently mentioned in these dark allegations is Major General Suresh Sallay, then head of Military Intelligence and a known confidant of former Defence Secretary and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Both Sallay and Rajapaksa have denied any wrongdoing, but their proximity to key suspects—and more tellingly, their absolute silence when actionable warnings were received before the bombings—has raised more than eyebrows.
It has raised suspicion.
Adding a surreal twist to this already serpentine saga is the suggestion that the entire security narrative around the Easter attacks may have been “scripted” by a now-notorious former Director-General of the Institute of National Security Studies (INSS)—a state-funded think tank that was, until recently, more propaganda factory than policy shop.
This particular Director-General, nicknamed the “Doggy Director” by insiders for his tail-wagging loyalty to political masters, allegedly drafted memos tying community leaders, NGOs, and Muslim academics to extremism, all in an effort to build a public case for state crackdowns.
His job wasn’t to investigate facts. It was to manufacture fear.
In the process, dozens of innocent individuals—including women with no criminal history—were rounded up, detained without charges, and dragged through the court system for half a decade, while the real questions surrounding the Easter bombings remained unanswered.
The Easter attacks were horrific. That cannot be denied. But what happened afterward—particularly under the Rajapaksa administration—was equally horrifying in a different way. The state used the tragedy to crack down on civil liberties, surveil Muslim communities, and fast-track ultra-nationalist policy agendas.
In other words, grief became governance.
The suspects released this week were not anomalies—they were pawns. Their arrests served a purpose at a political moment: to show a tough stance on extremism, to distract from intelligence failures, and to frame a broader narrative of “protecting the nation.”
Now, five years later, their release is unlikely to generate headlines, because their incarceration never should have happened in the first place.
With each new release, the question becomes more uncomfortable: if so many suspects are being cleared after years in custody, who actually carried out the Easter bombings? And who allowed it to happen?
More worryingly, who engineered the aftermath?
The recent Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the attacks offered more smoke than fire. While it confirmed that warnings from Indian intelligence were ignored, and that high-level figures failed to act, it did little to prosecute anyone meaningfully.
Meanwhile, the actual mechanisms of the attack—the procurement of explosives, the online radicalisation, the logistics—remain clouded in silence.
And now, with suspects being quietly released, it seems that closure is not just elusive—it is actively being delayed.
To its credit, the Colombo Magistrate’s Court has finally acknowledged what has long been evident: that these individuals were wrongfully accused. But justice delayed, as the saying goes, is justice denied.
More than five years of reputational damage, psychological trauma, and economic hardship have passed. Who will compensate the suspects for time lost, families separated, and careers destroyed?
The Terrorism Investigation Division has moved on. The Attorney General’s office has closed the file. But the individuals released must now pick up the pieces of lives shattered by an investigation built on fraudulence.
Since the election of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the new coalition government’s promise to reform the justice and intelligence sectors, there has been some movement toward institutional accountability.
But critics argue that unless individuals like Suresh Sallay, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and the INSS’s former Director-General are thoroughly investigated—and not just shielded by officialdom—no real justice will be served.
The COPE committee, along with international rights groups, is now calling for a special independent commission to re-investigate the Easter Sunday attacks—this time with foreign technical assistance and full transparency.
If Sri Lanka is to rebuild its credibility as a democratic state, it must show that it is capable of admitting to, and prosecuting, its own sins—not merely detaining scapegoats.
The release of the twelve suspects this week may seem like a legal technicality. But in truth, it is a symbolic crack in the façade of the official story—a signal that not all was as it seemed in the aftermath of the Easter tragedy.
The public deserves answers—not whispered apologies.
Until the true orchestrators of this national trauma are exposed and prosecuted, the country will continue to live under the shadow of Easter Sunday—not because of what happened on that day, but because of what followed.
And so we ask again: in Sri Lanka, is justice an outcome—or just another stage performance?
-By LeN Legal Affairs Correspondent
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by (2025-05-17 16:11:17)
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