-By Ruwan Weerakoon
(Lanka-e-News -2026.June.30, 11.30 PM) Seven years after coordinated suicide bombings across Sri Lanka killed more than 260 people on Easter morning, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) has fundamentally recast the nature of its case. The ongoing investigation into retired Major General Suresh Sallay is no longer primarily a probe into what warnings were ignored. It is now, in the state's own characterization, a conspiracy investigation—one that names Sallay not as a passive bystander to institutional failure, but as an operational participant in the attack itself.
The transition formalizes what investigators had been building toward since Sallay's arrest under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) in late February 2026: a prosecution theory predicated on active direction rather than a mere dereliction of duty.
The most operationally specific claim emerging from the state's updated brief centers on a pre-attack timeline disclosed before parliament. According to a parliamentary briefing by Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala, CID investigators allege that exactly three weeks before the April 21, 2019 bombings, Sallay held a physical meeting with four individuals connected to local extremist networks.
During that meeting, the minister stated, Sallay allegedly tasked those individuals with gathering granular intelligence on a specific Catholic church in Negombo—specifically requesting the physical layout of the building, its precise location, and the expected size of the congregation during festive Easter services. The minister further noted that witness testimonies have since identified at least one of the four individuals present as an ISIS-linked operative who vanished in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.
Legal Attribution: As these specific pre-attack meeting dynamics remain a matter of ongoing parliamentary disclosure and have not been definitively finalized as established fact in open Magistrate's Court filings, this specific line of inquiry is reported strictly as the state's current operational allegation.
Parallel to the targeting allegation, the CID contends that Sallay took calculated, preemptive measures to prevent the plot from surfacing before it was executed. Investigators allege that he met directly with a military informant who had been attempting to escalate high-level warnings about the imminent extremist threat through official channels.
Rather than acting on the developing threat matrix, the CID maintains that the meeting was effectively used to neutralize the informant. This successfully blocked the critical threat assessment from reaching senior defense officials who might have moved independently to interdict the plot.
Since his arrest, the forensics phase of the investigation has encountered a technical standoff. The CID has formally placed on the record that Sallay is obstructing the digital strand of the inquiry by consistently refusing to provide passwords or decryption keys for secured mobile devices seized at the time of his detention.
Investigators believe those encrypted devices contain the definitive trail of communication with the attack network. This non-compliance has become a central talking point for the prosecution in recent remand hearings, where the CID has argued that the refusal constitutes active obstruction of justice rather than a routine exercise of legal rights.
The most structurally consequential dimension of the CID's case moves past the logistics of the attack itself to probe its political aftermath. Investigators are examining—and have presented before the Colombo Magistrate's Court—an investigative hypothesis that the Easter Sunday bombings were deliberately permitted to unfold to engineer a national security crisis. The political beneficiary of that crisis, according to the CID's current investigative theory, was then-presidential candidate Gotabaya Rajapaksa, whose campaign ran explicitly on a security-restoration platform and who won the presidency later that year.
The circumstantial evidence the CID presents as underpinning this theory centers on the immediate aftermath of the election. Sallay—the individual the CID now alleges helped direct the attack—was immediately appointed by the incoming Rajapaksa administration to head the State Intelligence Service (SIS), making him the first military officer in Sri Lankan history to command what had traditionally been a civilian-led agency, bypassing the police hierarchy. Former CID officials have testified that this alignment was subsequently used to systematically dismantle, transfer, and suppress the initial independent police investigations into the bombings.
Following the CID's presentation of this political timeline, the Colombo Magistrate's Court issued an overseas travel ban on former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to ensure his availability for questioning. Legal analysts emphasize that the travel ban represents a routine, precautionary court measure to facilitate an active inquiry; former President Rajapaksa has not been formally charged with any criminal offense.
What elevates this investigation beyond the case against a single officer is the CID's treatment of Sallay as one component in a three-part intelligence structure—a framework investigators have mapped out in current filings before the Colombo Magistrate's Court. The three figures at the center of that institutional framework are Sallay; former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa; and retired Major General Kapila Hendavitharana, widely regarded within military intelligence circles as a foundational architect of Sri Lanka's modern defense-intelligence apparatus.
The structural logic the CID advances is one of interlocking roles across two decades of institutional history. During Rajapaksa's long tenure as Defense Secretary, Hendavitharana served as his most trusted intelligence chief—first heading the Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) and later serving as Chief of National Intelligence (CNI). Sallay, investigators allege, rose through that system as Hendavitharana's direct protégé, eventually inheriting leadership of the DMI. The covert informant networks that the CID now claims were manipulated in the lead-up to Easter Sunday—including, it alleges, early-stage asset relationships with local radical Islamic factions—were originally established during this period of joint institutional stewardship.
Within this framework, the CID has assigned specific investigative roles to each figure:
The Intended Beneficiary: Former President Rajapaksa is characterized as the political beneficiary of the national security crisis created by the bombings.
The Strategic Overseer: Retired Major General Hendavitharana is a subject of active inquiry, with detectives probing whether his historical authority provided the high-level coordination and logistical insulation that shielded certain radical assets from standard police surveillance.
The Operational Layer: Sallay is framed as the hands-on intermediary accused of managing ground-level assets, conducting the pre-attack reconnaissance meeting, and suppressing early warnings before they could reach independent officials.
Legal Status: While Major General Hendavitharana's historical oversight of these networks forms a core pillar of the CID's institutional framework, he is currently a subject of investigative inquiry and has not been formally indicted or named as a criminal co-conspirator in court documentation.
Sallay continues to deny all allegations through his legal team, maintaining his complete innocence. His detention under the PTA has entered a volatile phase: he launched what his family characterized as a "fast unto death" to protest what they described as abusive and illegal treatment by CID investigators, prompting his emergency transfer to the Colombo National Hospital.
His family has since filed a formal complaint with the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) over his detention conditions and delivered a petition to the Apostolic Nuncio, decrying what they describe as a systemic trial by media in advance of any judicial verdict.
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by (2026-06-30 18:32:55)
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