Former Sri Lankan police chief and defense minister sentenced to death for Easter bombings failure
A former police chief and defense minister in Sri Lanka were sentenced to death for their failure to prevent the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings that killed over 250 people.
The Full Story
A plain summary built from the channels that reported this story.
Sri Lanka's High Court has sentenced the country's former police chief and a former defence minister to death for failing to prevent the Easter Sunday bombings in 2019. The coordinated attacks by suicide bombers killed 269 people and injured hundreds more. A majority of judges ruled that the two senior officials had ignored intelligence warnings that an attack was being planned. Both men have said they will appeal against the sentence, which is likely to be commuted to life imprisonment.
The bombings on 21 April 2019 targeted three churches and three luxury hotels. The perpetrators were a local Islamist extremist group known as the NTJ, which had pledged allegiance to Islamic State. The court found that the former police chief and the former defence secretary were criminally negligent in failing to act on specific warnings. The verdict comes more than seven years after the attacks, and follows years of pressure from victims' families and religious leaders, including Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith.
The case has also drawn attention to wider allegations of a cover-up. In 2023, a Channel 4 Dispatches programme broadcast whistleblower testimony that accused senior government and intelligence officials of sabotaging the investigation. The programme alleged that the attacks were exploited to create political conditions that helped Gotabaya Rajapaksa win the presidency later that year. Rajapaksa, who was defence secretary at the time of the bombings, announced his candidacy days after the attacks and won in a landslide. He was ousted in 2022 and fled the country.
The recent court rulings do not address those wider conspiracy claims, but they do establish that senior officials failed to act on intelligence. The government, which came to power with a large majority in 2024 on a platform of institutional reform, has signalled that further charges are imminent. A former president has already applied to the appeal court to prevent a potential arrest. Victims' families have welcomed the verdict as a step towards justice, but say the full truth has yet to emerge.
On screen
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Key Claims
Claims reported during this story's coverage, mapped by channel. Ordered by how many channels carried each claim.
| Claim | Channel 4 |
|---|---|
| A Channel 4 Dispatches programme revealed whistleblower testimony alleging officials were complicit and sabotaged the investigation. | |
| A former police chief and former defence minister were sentenced to death for failing to act on intelligence warnings before the Easter Sunday bombings. | |
| More than 260 people were killed in the Easter Sunday bombings. |
Channel Perspectives
What each channel focused on, with key quotes.
Channel 4 News focused heavily on the broader political context and allegations of a cover-up, linking the bombings to the rise of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. It included a lengthy interview with a Sri Lankan journalist who emphasised the significance of the ruling for democracy and the victims. The report also referenced its own previous Dispatches investigation, giving the story a strong investigative and critical tone.
- “The recent court rulings do not determine the truth of wider conspiracy allegations even if they give credence to them.”
- “It's extremely important because in the past we have seen a steady erosion of these institutions like the judiciary and so on have been, in addition to the economic corruption, these two have been corrupt, the judiciary.”
- “All they ever wanted was a fit and proper inquiry, an adjusting inquiry, not one that found its way that was pressured into silence and so on.”
Broadcast Timeline
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