1 week Ago By Sahan Weerasooriya
Tuesday 22nd April, 2025The sixth anniversary of the Easter Sunday carnage has passed, yet the government has failed to fulfil its pledge to make an earth-shattering revelation about the masterminds behind it. Instead, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has handed over to the CID all volumes of the final report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI) that probed the 2019 terror attacks.The PCoI has not recommended that its complete report be handed over to the CID.
It has requested the President to send ‘a complete set of the report to the Attorney General to consider institution of criminal proceedings against persons alleged to have committed the said offences’.Interestingly, the PCoI report the President has sent to the CID contains some key findings that run counter to the government’s contention that there was a political conspiracy behind the carnage. The report says in Chapter 32: “The original plan of Zahran was to attack the Kandy Perahera.
But it was advanced due to the recovery of explosives from Wanathawilluwa and international factors. IS was losing ground in Syria and Iraq and called on its faithful to launch attacks. He was also concerned that the law enforcement authorities may apprehend him soon” (p.
467).There is a vital document that President Dissanayake should hand over to the CID. It is the report of the Imam Committee, which probed the allegations made in a Channel 4 programme, ‘Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday bombings – Dispatches’, telecast on 5 Sept.
, 2023. That presidential committee comprising former Judge of the Supreme Court S. I.
Imam (Chairman), former Commander of the Sri Lanka Air Force Air Chief Marshal Jayalath Weerakkody and President’s Counsel Harsha A. J. Soza, has debunked a much-publicised claim by a person named Azad Moulana that there was a link between Sri Lanka’s military intelligence and Zahran’s terror group.
Some critical aspects of the Easter Sunday terror attacks have not been investigated thoroughly. One may recall that three months after the tragedy, Archbishop of Colombo Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, reportedly said, at St. Sebastian’s Church, Katuwapitiya, that the terror attacks had been part of an ‘international conspiracy’.
Media reports also said he had lashed out at President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe for lacking the courage to resist the foreign conspiracy to destabilise Sri Lanka. As we pointed out yesterday, he is one of the key witnesses who said in their testimonies before the PCoI that probed the Easter Sunday carnage that there had been a foreign hand/conspiracy behind the terror attacks.Meanwhile, in a leaked audio clip of what is described as a telephone conversation between Deputy Minister Rajan Ramanayake and SSP Shani Abeysekera, during the Yahapalana government, about the Easter Sunday terror attacks, the latter is heard telling the former something in Sinhala to the effect that Mohamed Ibrahim, a wealthy businessman who was a JVP’s National List nominee for the 2015 general election, cannot be so stupid as not to have known what his two sons, who carried out suicide bomb attacks on 21 April 2019, had been doing.
If this audio recording is not fake, the CID should go by Abeysekera’s contention, and interrogate Ibrahim again as part of their efforts to identify the terror masterminds. One may recall that when Ishara Sewwandi, a female accomplice of the gunman who killed underworld leader Ganemulle Sanjeewa in a courtroom at Hulftsdorp, went into hiding, the police arrested and grilled her mother and brother. The question is whether the NPP will allow its former National List candidate to be interrogated.
The government and the CID must peruse all reports on the Easter Sunday terror attacks thoroughly, keep an open mind and follow evidence wherever it leads if the integrity of the ongoing probe is not to be undermined. Politically motivated timeframes must not be imposed on criminal investigations..
