Sri Lanka’s investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings has finally turned to the country’s intelligence architecture. The arrest of a former spy chief forces a reckoning the island has avoided for seven years.
The coordinated suicide bombings on April 21, 2019 killed 279 people across three churches and three luxury hotels. For years, the official story was straightforward: a failure of coordination, poor intelligence sharing, and an incompetent government that ignored Indian warnings. The administration of President Maithripala Sirisena was divided. The prime minister and the president were barely speaking. Warnings arrived and were lost. The bombers walked through security undetected. The state failed, but it failed through negligence, not design.
That version of events no longer holds.
In February 2026, Sri Lankan police arrested retired Major General Tuan Suresh Sallay, the former director of the State Intelligence Service, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The charge was conspiracy and aiding and abetting the Easter Sunday attacks. In June, Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala told Parliament that Sallay had “strategically directed” the extremists who carried out the bombings and had identified a Catholic church as a target just three weeks before the attack.
Sallay denies the allegations. His supporters call the arrest political theater. But the accusation, from the government’s own security minister, marks the first time the state has officially connected a serving intelligence chief to directing the worst terrorist attack in Sri Lanka’s modern history.
The investigation has shifted because the government changed. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who won the 2024 election on an anti-corruption platform, reopened the case and reinstated Shani Abeysekara as director of the Criminal Investigation Department. Abeysekara had led the original probe in 2019, and 38 of the 41 High Court cases filed over the Easter attacks came from his work. He was removed in November 2019 after Gotabaya Rajapaksa became president. In the years that followed, only three new cases were filed.
The difference in pace tells its own story.
The deeper shift is in the question being asked. After a British Channel 4 documentary in 2023, a whistleblower named Azad Maulana, a former aide to pro-Rajapaksa politician Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan (known as Pillayan), claimed that senior intelligence officers had maintained contacts with the extremist group National Thowheed Jamaath before the attacks. The motive, Maulana said, was political: create chaos, blame Islamist extremism, and clear the path for Rajapaksa to win the presidency. Two days after the bombings, Rajapaksa announced his candidacy. He won in November by a landslide.
Dissanayake put it bluntly. The bombings, he said, were “a tragedy used to seize power.”
That formulation changes everything. The question is no longer about incompetence. It is about whether parts of the state allowed or directed the killing of 279 people for electoral gain.
Sallay’s arrest has forced open a debate Sri Lanka thought it had buried. The country’s security architecture was built during the civil war against the Tamil Tigers, a conflict that lasted 26 years and killed over 100,000 people. Intelligence agencies operated with near-total impunity. Their records were secret. Their methods went unquestioned. When the war ended in 2009, the architecture did not shrink. It stayed in place, intact and unaccountable, serving whoever held power.
The Easter investigation now asks whether that architecture was used against the country’s own people. Investigators have secured court orders preventing former president Rajapaksa from leaving Sri Lanka. The Criminal Investigation Department has stopped short of naming him a suspect, but official sources say he is likely to be questioned.
The NPP government has built its mandate on accountability. It has arrested former ministers, businessmen, and organized crime figures. The old assumption that power could delay accountability indefinitely has begun to shake. But the government must also produce cases that hold up in court. Sri Lanka has seen this before: the 2015 Yahapalana government promised anti-corruption prosecutions and delivered almost nothing. The courts will need evidence, not statements from Parliament.
The Catholic Church, which has campaigned for justice since the bombings, welcomed Sallay’s arrest but made clear what it expects. “We want to see justice for all the victims,” said Father Cyril Gamini Fernando, a church spokesman.
Seven years after the bombs went off, Sri Lanka is finally asking who was holding the detonator. The answer may tell the country more about its intelligence services than it ever wanted to know.
- George, 1ban.news