In the forty-seven days between March 7, 2019 and April 21, 2019, the State Intelligence Service handed the Criminal Investigation Department three separate pieces of actionable intelligence about the men who would carry out the Easter Sunday bombings.
On March 7, intelligence officers pinpointed the exact hideouts of three men: Rilwan, Shaini, and a figure known as Army Mohideen. These locations were forwarded to the Criminal Investigation Department. One month earlier, the same intelligence service had provided the CID with formal written notice of Zaharan’s extremist connections. Three years before that, in February 2017, they had provided a list of ninety-five suspected extremists. In February 2019, they provided a second list. This one contained one hundred and twenty-nine names.
What happened next was not a failure of intelligence. It was institutional sabotage.
When the Terrorism Investigation Division attempted to execute warrants at locations where Zaharan’s associates were staying on February 28, 2019, they were turned away. The Criminal Investigation Department told them to stand down. We have built a network, the CID said. You do not interfere.
The network they were protecting consisted of the conspirators themselves. Army Mohideen, a man with an active arrest warrant since 2017, was befriended rather than arrested. He and others like him were not turned into informants. They were turned into a communications channel. Information flowed backward. Zaharan received advance warning of the police investigation closing in on him.
Twenty-four days later, three hundred and sixty-eight people were dead.
The Easter Commission, when it examined what happened, was unambiguous. Chapters 114 to 155 documented a pattern that was neither accidental nor confused. The CID under its Director had made a deliberate operational choice to maintain control of an investigation by obstructing competing agencies. That choice produced a specific result. The conspirators remained active. The plot proceeded. The bombs detonated.
The Director was Shani Abeysekara.
What follows is not speculation about his conduct during the investigation. That is a matter of public record. It is documented in a government commission and cannot be disputed. What follows is a question about his fitness to investigate the very institution whose members he now accuses.
In November 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa removed Shani Abeysekara from the CID. In January 2020, Rajapaksa suspended him. In July 2020, Rajapaksa’s government arrested him. He was held for ten months and eighteen days. No charge sheet was filed.
In June 2024, newly hired as a consultant, Shani Abeysekara joined the National People’s Power. He stood on their electoral stage. He campaigned publicly for their victory. When that party won the presidency and came to power in September 2024, Shani Abeysekara was rehired by the same government. First as Director of Crimes. Then, in June 2025, as Director of the CID.
It is now that same Shani Abeysekara, empowered by the government that freed him, who is directing the investigation into Major General Suresh Sallay for alleged Easter Sunday involvement.
The architecture of this arrangement is not subtle. A man was removed and imprisoned by one government. A man was freed and rehabilitated by another. That same man now has the power to investigate the military apparatus of the government that imprisoned him. He has the power to justify the government that freed him. He has the power to vindicate his own political choice to join their party.
This is not an institutional conflict of interest. This is a conflict written into the basic DNA of the appointment.
Now for the substance of what he failed to do.
The Easter Commission established that Shani Abeysekara, as CID Director, rejected Interpol assistance when it was offered. He ignored formal written warnings about extremist networks from the intelligence service. He received two separate lists of suspected terrorists and filed them away. He actively obstructed another agency from executing warrants on suspects his own force had in its sights. These are not allegations. These are findings of a government-commissioned inquiry. They are in the public record. They cannot be disputed or reframed.
The result was that three hundred and sixty-eight people were killed.
This is not ancient history or theoretical failure. This is recent, measurable, and consequential. The man who made those decisions has not been prosecuted for them. He has not been demoted as a result of them. He has not been sidelined to a post where he lacks operational authority.
He has been elevated.
He now commands the most politically sensitive investigation in the country. He commands access to classified military intelligence. He commands the authority to detain suspects indefinitely. He commands the CID apparatus to conduct surveillance and interrogation. All of this authority flows to a man whose primary institutional incentive is to demonstrate that the military apparatus he is investigating was guilty of the very crimes the intelligence service failed to prevent on his watch.
If this is justice, then justice has ceased to mean what the word is supposed to mean.
Major General Suresh Sallay may be guilty of what he is accused of. That is possible. It is also possible that he is not. The courts will decide. But the courts will decide based on an investigation led by a man with every conceivable reason to manufacture that guilt.
The Sri Lankan government had fifty thousand police officers in its establishment when Shani Abeysekara was brought back to power. It had former directors with different histories. It had investigators without personal grievances tied to the previous administration. It had people who could conduct this investigation without standing to gain from the outcome.
It chose this man instead.
That choice has a meaning. That meaning is that Sri Lanka is no longer pretending that this process is about justice. It is about political accounting. It is about a government using the police apparatus to settle scores with the military apparatus of the previous regime. It is about a man using state power to vindicate the political choice that freed him from a cell.
When the history of this country is written, that choice will matter more than whatever Suresh Sallay did or did not do. It will matter more because it tells you what kind of country Sri Lanka has become.
It tells you that merit does not determine who wields power. Political loyalty does.
It tells you that conflict of interest is not an impediment to investigation. It is a job requirement.
It tells you that the men who failed catastrophically are not set aside. They are promoted.
This is not a system of justice. This is a system of power dressed up in the language of justice. And it deserves to be named as such.
