by Our Correspondnent in Colombo
A significant disclosure was made during yesterday’s court proceedings into Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks, when Additional Solicitor General Dileepa Peiris told the court that military intelligence had informed the Criminal Investigation Department that Zahran Hashim and his associates were responsible for the Vavunathivu killings approximately nine days before the Easter Sunday attacks.
The disclosure places a previously identified intelligence trail directly in the final days before the 21 April 2019 bombings, which killed 278 people and left more than 500 others disabled. It also establishes that information linking Zahran and his associates to the Vavunathivu killings had reached the country’s principal criminal investigative agency before the attacks.
According to evidence presented by the Attorney General’s Department, the information concerned the killing of two police officers at Vavunathivu. A military intelligence informant had reportedly provided information linking Zahran and his associates to the killings as early as the day after the incident. The information was subsequently handled within the military intelligence system as the reliability and significance of intelligence from informants were assessed.
The critical disclosure came when Colonel Maddumage, who was responsible for the Third Intelligence Battalion, informed the CID that Zahran and his associates were responsible for the Vavunathivu killings approximately nine days before the Easter Sunday attacks. At the time, the CID was headed by Ravi Seneviratne, with Shani Abeysekara serving as its Director.
The timing is central to the significance of yesterday’s proceedings. The issue is not simply whether intelligence agencies possessed information about Zahran, or whether every initial intelligence report could immediately be treated as verified intelligence. Rather, the court has now heard that information specifically identifying Zahran and his associates in connection with the Vavunathivu killings was communicated to the CID nine days before the Easter attacks.
