The Pulse | Security | South Asia

Sri Lanka’s Easter Blasts Probe Enters the Intelligence Architecture

While not every arrest will lead to a conviction, the old assumption that power could delay accountability indefinitely has begun to shake.

Sri Lanka’s investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks, under the National People’s Power (NPP) government, has moved into the intelligence services. A few years ago, this would have been unimaginable.

The arrest of former State Intelligence Service Director Major General (retd.) Tuan Suresh Sallay for his suspected role in the Easter terrorist attacks, forces Sri Lanka to confront the security architecture that expanded during the civil war, survived the postwar transition, and often operated beyond public scrutiny.

From Security Failure to State Suspicion

During the first few years after the attacks, many Sri Lankans believed that the Easter attacks were the result of the failure of coordination and the incompetence of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe administration. The accepted narrative was that intelligence officials failed to act on warnings from India, and the government, divided between President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, neglected national security. There was a lack of coordination across the bureaucracy that had weakened the state at the worst possible moment.

The Parliamentary Select Committee and the Presidential Commission of Inquiry documented serious failures in the security apparatus and several committees appointed by Wickremesinghe, once he came into the presidency in 2022, all reinforced the narrative that negligence and dysfunction had made the attacks possible.

But in the years following 2022, cracks started appearing in the narrative. With the collapse of trust in the established order, claims that once remained at the margins moved to the center of public debate.

The attacks killed over 260 people, shattered the fragile postwar normalcy, and helped Gotabaya Rajapaksa win the 2019 presidential election in a landslide. Rajapaksa presented himself as the candidate of security and order, and promised to get to the bottom of the attacks. Yet his government made little visible progress.

About 41 High Court cases were filed in connection with the Easter Sunday attacks, and 38 of them grew out of investigations carried out by Shani Abeysekara, who was director of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) when the attacks took place. Only three cases were filed after Abeysekara was removed from the CID following Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s rise to power in November 2019. The lack of progress under the Rajapaksa administration made many Sri Lankans uneasy and strengthened the suspicion that the investigation had not merely stalled, but had been redirected away from politically sensitive questions. If Abeysekara’s investigations had done the heavy lifting, people began to question why he was removed.

That unease made people open to claims that the attacks may have involved more than Islamist extremism and official negligence. When Azad Maulana, a former aide to Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan aka Pillayan, alleged that senior intelligence officers had maintained contacts with extremist actors before the attacks, his claims reinforced growing public doubt about the official story. Pillayan is the former chief minister of the Eastern Province and a close associate of the Rajapaksas. Maulana’s claims would not have created an impact if not for the stalled investigation.

A promise for answers became one of the NPP’s election pledges. After coming to power, the NPP renewed and reinvigorated the investigations. Abeysekara was reappointed CID director, and a number of cases are making rapid progress.

One of the most important new developments is the focus on whether elements of Sri Lanka’s intelligence apparatus worked with, protected or manipulated Islamist extremists before the attacks.

In 2025, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake described the bombings as a tragedy used to seize power. He later told Parliament that even destroyed evidence would not prevent the government from finding the truth. He has also warned that rogue elements within the police and armed forces would not be spared.

While Maulana’s Channel 4 interview remains the most discussed source of the allegation, the line of inquiry did not begin there. As early as May 2019, a suspect had reportedly pointed investigators toward contacts between Zahran Hashim’s circle and Pillayan. The investigation has........

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