Not jihad but servility: Arrest of ex-intel chief recasts Easter massacre in Sri Lanka
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The 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bombings targeting churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka, which killed 279 people and were then dubbed and clamoured under the rubric of Islamic terrorism, have now assumed a far more sinister contour with the arrest of former State Intelligence Service Chief Retired Major-General Suresh Sallay.
His alleged servility to former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa is said to have facilitated an orchestrated operation in which religious fanaticism was cynically instrumentalised to secure electoral ascendancy.
Criminal investigators took Sallay into custody in the early hours of Wednesday at a Colombo suburb, accusing him of conspiracy and of aiding and abetting the coordinated suicide attacks that not only extinguished 279 lives, including 45 foreign nationals, but also injured more than 500 others and paralysed the tourism-dependent economy.
The carnage, which struck at houses of worship and opulent hotels, convulsed the island nation and precipitated both political upheaval and relentless international scrutiny.
While the authorities initially ascribed culpability to a local extremist outfit, subsequent allegations gestated into a far graver thesis: that intelligence forewarnings, including alerts from Indian agencies, had been egregiously disregarded, and that the outrage may have been manipulated to recalibrate the political landscape.
In 2023, the British broadcaster Channel 4 aired an investigative report alleging prior contact between Sallay and the perpetrators, while a whistleblower averred that the attacks were permitted to proceed in order to influence the presidential election in favour of Rajapaksa, who declared his candidacy days after the massacre and triumphed on an uncompromising national security platform.
Following that victory, Sallay was elevated to helm the SIS, a tenure that endured until 2024 when President Anura Kumara Dissanayake removed him from office, pledging accountability for the atrocities. Sallay has consistently repudiated the allegations.
Earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled that former president Maithripala Sirisena and other senior officials had failed in their duty to prevent the bombings and ordered compensation for victims’ families, while the United Nations pressed for the disclosure of suppressed investigative findings.
Mohamed Nizam Kariapper, President’s Counsel and parliamentarian, described Sallay’s arrest as an official acknowledgement that the bombings were not merely acts of religious extremism but a meticulously choreographed enterprise, expressing hope that the ultimate architect of what he termed an “open secret” would now be unmasked.