By  Shivanthi ranasinghe Courtesy Ceylon Today

The call for an independent investigation of the Easter Sunday bombings grew in crescendo during the last months of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s tenure in Office. The Catholic Church actively galvanised the anti-government protesters to oust President Gotabaya. Their grievance was not so much than the economic crisis but that the culprits they identified as responsible for the attacks were not brought to book.

The Church was especially upset that Senior DIG of Police Nilantha Jayawardena, who was the Head of the State Intelligence Service (SIS) at the time of the attacks, went on to receive a promotion under the Gotabaya Administration. The Church specifically holds this officer responsible for dereliction of duty.

The manner in which both the Catholics aggrieved over the Islamist extremists’ attack on them and the radical Muslims who wish for Sharia Law in Sri Lanka, found common ground to join the anti

-Government protests, was ironic. It was still more ironic the way these grievances simply melted away with President Gotabaya’s resignation.

For more than a year, we did not hear the Catholic Church’s call for justice or an independent inquiry. The reason for the call to be muted as soon as President Gotabaya left Office is also confounding.

However, that call has re-emerged and has been increasing with gusto. The head of the Church in Sri Lanka Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith is again on a mission to enlist the international community’s support to pressurise the Sri Lankan Government. It is unclear as to what precipitated this change.

According to Cardinal Ranjith, Pope Francis too, has reiterated the call to seek justice for the Easter Sunday victims. Do not give up hope”, was the message delivered by Pope Francis when Cardinal Ranjith and other members of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference, as they met with the Pope in Rome to make the traditional obligatory Ad Limina visit, which takes place every five years.

Channel 4 Documentary

It is not only the Cardinal’s voice that has reawakened. Channel 4 aired a very controversial and factually-incorrect documentary on the attacks. This is the second documentary Channel 4 has done on Sri Lanka. The first one, on alleged war crimes, was just as controversial and factually challenging as this one.

According to this particular documentary, Azad Moulana – a former Government aide to a current Sri Lankan Government Minister – claims that he witnessed a meeting between the NTJ terrorists and the then Head of Military Intelligence, Brigadier Suresh Salley in February 2018 – 14 months before the attack. The problem with this allegation is that Brigadier Salley was not even in the country.

Interestingly, Channel 4 declined to appear before a Commission of Inquiry set up by incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe. The reason cited was they need to protect confidential sources. This certainly does not add any credibility to their documentary.

The source’s anonymity can be preserved but the Channel must have done its own investigation to verify facts. That verification must be shared with the Government of Sri Lanka and so facilitate the investigation of the allegations against Brigadier Salley.

Appeal to Australia

In the attacks, two Australians lost their lives. Sri Lankan-born Chathudilla Weerasinghe now domiciled in Australia sustained injuries during the Attack. According to her, one fragment is too close to her heart and thus poses too much of a risk to remove it.

According to her father Ranjith, a Mathematics Lecturer at Monash University, the family believes that there could be truth in the allegations that the Sri Lankan authorities might have been complicit in the Attack. He claims that the Sri Lankan politicians are a different breed to the Australian counterpart.

It is an interesting observation. The LTTE ideologists in Australia are quite vociferous and several Australian MPs have openly expressed their sympathies with the separatists. It is not because they are being misinformed but more in an attempt to attract their Tamil vote base in their constituencies.

New Zealand authorities have been found to have attempted to deport Sri Lankan-origin Islamist extremists to Sri Lanka. However, they failed to share or inform the Sri Lankan authorities of their suspicions or other valuable information pertaining to the deportee. The excuse given is that they fear the deportee’s life would be endangered if such information was shared with the Sri Lankan counterparts. This leaves the glaring question as to the plight of such extremists’ potential victims.

Disregarding these issues, Cardinal Ranjith calls upon the Australian Government to back his call for international pressure for an independent investigation. It is extremely unfortunate that the Cardinal is not using his extraordinary influence to bring balance to this whole scenario.

Allegations against Military Intelligence

Recently a former Senior DIG of Police, Ravi Seneviratne made some damning allegations against the Gotabaya Administration as well as the Military Intelligence (MI). He claimed he and his team were pulled out of the investigation on the Attacks – and this was even before a new Cabinet or Prime Minister was appointed in the Gotabaya Administration. He alleges this to be an illegal act.

Furthermore, he recalls over 700 officers attached to the CID were prohibited from travelling overseas. This in turn, he says, caused fear in the Department.

He also accused the MI of not sharing accurate information pertaining to the Islamist extremism. According to him, the MI directly intervened to prevent the police investigating teams from probing further by claiming that they were involved in National Security Operations.

However, this Officer is not disclosing the whole truth. SSP Shani Abeysekara who was the Director of the CID led a politically motivated campaign against specific MI teams. Thereby he dismantled carefully nurtured MI networks as he exposed the officers and men involved in these teams. He arrested and detained nearly 400 MI officers and men – some were of the highest ranks as the Director of the MI Major General Amal Karunasekera.

It became a weekly media circus as these high-performing MI officers were cuffed, chained and carted back and forth from remand Prison to Courts for over a year. Despite all that hype, the CID investigators could not find a single shred of evidence to substantiate their cases even to file a B-report.

The emergence of voice tapes between the CID Director and a Government MP threw light on the real motivation behind these arrests. It was to coerce the detained Officers and men to name Gotabaya Rajapaksa as the commander of various crimes. At the time, the former Defence Secretary Gotabaya was considered a formidable political threat to the then Government.

As soon as Gotabaya Rajapaksa became President, Shani Abeysekara’s second-in-command left for Switzerland on Political asylum. How he obtained asylum within days of the new President assuming Office is an enigma.

It is suspected that he took with him a number of documents of ‘State importance’. The truth of this is to be verified as none has emerged to date. It was this that led the new administration to impose a travel ban on the CID officers with the forethought they were most likely to leave the country in such a disreputable manner.

Everyone has a theory about the Easter Sunday Attacks. It is unfortunate that most have disregarded facts on the ground to establish their own theory. Instead, these theories are based on their own political thinking and facts that only fit into that model are allowed. It is very sad thus that those who are calling for justice for the victims are not for the victims.

ranasingheshivanthi@gmail.com

By Shivanthi Ranasinghe