Sri Lanka's Easter Bombing Verdict Convicts Five But Leaves Truth Untouched

The convictions are real. The truth remains unfinished.

Fifteen of the twenty-four men accused of direct involvement in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings have been found guilty by Sri Lanka’s High Court. Fourteen were convicted on all charges — murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and possession of firearms and explosives under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. A fifteenth received partial convictions. Nine others were acquitted of aiding and abetting the suicide bombers. Sentencing was deferred to a later date.

The verdict ends a legal proceeding that began with an agonizing gap: the attacks came in April 2019, the prosecution opened in November 2021, and now, years later, a court has delivered its judgment. Twenty-three thousand charges were filed. More than 2,300 people testified. Over 2,000 pieces of evidence were entered into the record — explosives, swords, firearms, documents. All the accused are from Sri Lanka’s minority Muslim community.

But closing this trial does not close the story.

The architecture of the attacks is clear. The architecture of impunity is not.

Naufer Moulavi was named the main architect. He submitted a voluntary confession to the court, then retracted it, claiming he had not been shown what he was signing. The court accepted his guilt anyway. Twenty-three hundred witnesses placed him at the center of a coordinated plot that struck six targets on a single morning: three churches and three luxury hotels in Colombo. Two hundred seventy-nine people died. At least 450 were injured. Among the dead were Japanese, Dutch, Chinese, British, American, and Portuguese nationals.

It was the deadliest attack in Sri Lanka since the civil war ended in 2009. It marked a rupture in a society that had spent a decade convincing itself the violence was over.

The failures extend far beyond the bombers.

In 2023, Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court ruled that former President Maithripala Sirisena and four senior officials failed to prevent the bombings despite receiving intelligence warnings two weeks in advance. Sirisena was ordered to pay 100 million rupees from his personal funds. The former police chief, two intelligence officials, and the former defence ministry secretary were ordered to pay a combined 210 million rupees. The court found that Sirisena, who also served as defence minister and commander-in-chief, had neglected to hold regular national security council meetings and had excluded key personnel from those he did convene.

Last month, former Police Chief Pujith Jayasundara and former Defence Ministry Secretary Hemasiri Fernando were sentenced to death for criminal negligence. Both will appeal.

And then there is Retired Major-General Suresh Sallay, the former intelligence chief, arrested in February this year. He was promoted to State Intelligence Service chief in 2009 after Gotabaya Rajapaksa became president. He faces charges of conspiracy and aiding and abetting. He denies them. A Channel 4 investigation in 2023 found that Sallay had met with the bombers before the attack. A whistleblower told the network that Sallay permitted the attacks to proceed deliberately, with the aim of influencing the presidential election in Rajapaksa’s favor.

Two days after the bombings, Rajapaksa declared his candidacy. He won in November in a landslide, running on a promise to crush violence. His government fell three years later to mass protests over economic collapse.

Who benefits when a trial ends?

The verdict delivers accountability for the men who lit the bombs. It does not deliver accountability for the system that allowed them to do so. Nine of the twenty-five originally charged walked free. One defendant died in custody before the trial concluded. The legal process, vast as it was — 23,000 charges, thousands of witnesses — was still unable to reach every person whose actions made the attacks possible.

Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church has been vocal about this gap. Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith addressed the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in 2022, demanding an international probe. He argued that the initial narrative — that the massacre was the work of Islamic extremists — obscured a deeper political design. Subsequent investigations, he said, pointed in a different direction. Indian intelligence warnings were ignored. Security protocols were ignored. The pattern is consistent: those with the power to prevent the attacks bore no meaningful consequence until years later, and even then, the penalties fell short of the severity of their failure.

The communal toll is the quiet cost.

All of the accused are Muslim. In a country where the Tamil minority endured decades of persecution and the Sinhalese majority dominates politics, Sri Lanka’s Muslim community has long occupied an ambiguous space — never fully belonging, often fully suspectable. The Easter bombings transformed that suspicion into something sharper. Communities that had coexisted, however imperfectly, for decades found themselves divided by fear and anger.

Convicting fifteen men does not repair that fracture. It may even deepen it, if the narrative that survives is simply that Muslim extremism killed 279 people, rather than that a network of state actors enabled the killing and then punished only its most visible instruments.

What happens next is uncertain.

The five acquitted await final resolution. The convicted face sentencing later this year. Jayasundara and Fernando will appeal their death sentences. Sallay’s case is ongoing. The Supreme Court’s civil ruling against Sirisena and the others remains enforceable in principle but untested in practice. No high-ranking official has yet served time for the intelligence failures that preceded the attacks.

For the families of the 279 dead, the verdict is a milestone, not an endpoint. They have waited seven years for this moment. They will now wait longer for sentencing, for appeals, for whatever comes after. The legal machinery has moved, slowly, toward some form of justice. But justice in cases like this is rarely a single verdict. It is a process — and in Sri Lanka, that process remains incomplete.

The question that lingers is not whether fifteen guilty men will be punished. It is whether the country will admit how much easier the punishment would have been if the warnings had been heeded, if the meetings had been held, if the intelligence had been acted upon. That admission would require naming names that the current legal framework has not yet forced into the open. It would require a reckoning that goes beyond the courtroom.

That reckoning has not begun.