A three-judge bench in Colombo ended a five-year trial by convicting 14 men over the attacks that killed more than 260 people, leaving hard questions about state complicity untouched.
Colombo's High Court convicted 14 men on Tuesday for their roles in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, closing a five-year trial over the deadliest terrorist attack in Sri Lanka's history. A three-judge bench read its verdict in a courtroom ringed by armed commandos, fixing direct responsibility for strikes that killed more than 260 people and wounded roughly 500.
Nine of the 24 defendants were acquitted outright, and the panel found one additional man guilty on only part of the charges against him, bringing the number facing punishment to 15. Every defendant had denied involvement. Sentencing was deferred, and no date was set.
Prosecutors filed 23,270 charges in the case, the largest single filing in the country's legal record. The counts included murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and firearms and explosives offenses under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
The assault on April 21, 2019 unfolded in a single wave. Suicide bombers targeted three churches, two Roman Catholic and one evangelical Protestant, along with three luxury hotels in Colombo and on the eastern coast, timing the strikes to Easter services and holiday gatherings.
Some counts place the death toll at 279, with about 500 wounded. At least 42 of the dead were foreign nationals. Five Americans were among the victims, including a U.S. Commerce Department employee who was in Colombo on official business. Citizens of Britain, Australia, India, China, Japan, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey and Bangladesh also died.
None of the men believed to have carried out the bombings survived them. Investigators attributed the operation to two homegrown Islamist militant groups inspired by the Islamic State.
The trial ran in the shadow of a separate inquiry into whether figures inside the Sri Lankan state helped enable the attackers. It also lands in a year when tribunals abroad have been closing long-running atrocity cases, including the Hague proceeding that convicted Kosovo's former president of war crimes.
Former intelligence chief Suresh Sallay is in custody on accusations that he orchestrated the bombings. Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala told parliament in June that investigators considered Sallay the "mastermind" of the plot and believed he had worked with Islamist extremists before the attacks. Sallay denies the allegation.
Court filings lay out a more troubling theory still: that the militant network was cultivated to manufacture a security threat that would build political support for the Rajapaksa family, which returned to power months later with the election of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The Rajapaksa camp rejects any claim of state involvement, and its supporters argue the militants double-crossed their handlers and acted independently.
Sri Lanka's Catholic Church has contended, without providing evidence, that those convicted so far were not the architects of the attack.
Three defendants in Sri Lankan custody were separately charged by U.S. authorities in December 2020 with terrorism-related offenses tied to the bombings, a step that showed how far the attack reached beyond the island.
Accountability for the security failures has already begun to land closer to home. In July, a former police chief and a former senior defense ministry official were sentenced to death for failing to act on foreign intelligence warnings that preceded the attacks.
Sri Lanka has not carried out an execution since 1976, so death sentences there typically resolve into life imprisonment.
Sentencing is the immediate question, and the penalties handed down will shape how the case is remembered. The court's full reasoning, once published, will be combed for what it says about the state-collusion allegations that have never been tested at trial.
The pending case against Sallay remains the bigger test of whether Sri Lanka's institutions can investigate a plot that may have reached into their own ranks. For allies watching the region, Tuesday's verdict is at least a signal that the country's courts can still deliver in a case where the political stakes cut to the top of its own government.
A three-judge bench in Colombo ended a five-year trial by convicting 14 men over the attacks that killed more than 260 people, leaving hard questions about state complicity untouched.
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