The Colombo Permanent High Court Trial-at-Bar has now spoken. After nearly five years of hearings, 23,270 charges and evidence from more than two thousand witnesses, fifteen men have been convicted for conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and related offences arising from the Easter Sunday attacks of 21 April 2019. Nine others have been acquitted because the prosecution did not prove the charges beyond reasonable doubt. The convicted have been sentenced to terms of rigorous imprisonment ranging from 200 to 260 years, and the Court has ordered the confiscation of their movable and immovable property. Appeals will follow. That is the right of every accused under the law.
This judgement is a necessary act of justice for the families who lost more than 270 loved ones, among them children at prayer and visitors who came to our island in trust, and for the hundreds who still carry wounds in body and mind. It is not, however, the closing of the Easter Sunday chapter. Anyone who treats the verdict as the end of the matter is mistaking a courtroom outcome for a national security settlement. The bombers are dead. Some of those who sold an alien, violent narrative in the name of Islam have been tried. What remains, the political beneficiaries, the alleged planners who still walk free, and above all the fifth and most vulnerable layer: those who absorbed the ideology, passed through stages of radicalisation, and in some cases received training, yet have never been fully identified, is the harder task.
Five layers of responsibility, only two are closed
Clarity requires that we separate five distinct layers of this tragedy. Confusing them is how both conspiracy theories and official complacency thrive.
First, the idolators of a foreign death-cult. These are the men who imported and sold the ISIS narrative, a political ideology dressed in religious language, to a small circle of Sri Lankan Muslims. They distorted scripture, glorified suicide, and treated fellow citizens of other faiths as legitimate targets. The main prosecution has now reached them. Among those convicted is Mohamed Naufar Moulavi, identified by the prosecution as a principal organiser who supported the suicide squad. The law has done what the law must do. Wrongdoers face consequences. That principle is not optional.
Second, the perpetrators themselves. The sui loo mo mo cide cadres died in the churches and hotels they attacked. Others died days later at Sainthamaruthu, when remaining members of the network, including close relatives of Zahran Hashim, detonated explosives rather than surrender, killing their own family members, among them children. There is no romance in that ending. It was the logical destination of an ideology that consumes its own. Those who carried the bombs cannot be tried. They can only be remembered as a warning.
Third, political interest and those who benefited. A terror attack of this scale does not occur in a political vacuum. In the months that followed, fear was monetised, communities were collectively blamed, and careers and campaigns were built on the claim of being the only force that could keep the country safe. Whether those benefits were the product of opportunism after the fact, or of something darker before it, is not a matter for social-media speculation. It is a matter for investigation under the law. That investigation is not complete.
Fourth, the planners of the operation and those who may have enabled, ignored or exploited it. This is the layer that ordinary citizens, especially those who do not live on YouTube or in the comment sections, keep asking about: “What happened to the planners?” The question is legitimate. A separate track of inquiry, including the arrest earlier this year of former State Intelligence Service Director Major General (retd.) Tuan Suresh Sallay on allegations he denies, remains before the investigators and the courts. In July, former Inspector General of Police Pujith Jayasundara and former Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando were convicted of criminal negligence for failing to act on prior intelligence warnings. Those cases, too, will travel through appeal. Layers three and four are therefore open. To pretend otherwise is to insult the intelligence of the public.
Fifth-and the most vulnerable, those who were influenced, radicalised or trained and were never fully mapped. This is the layer that a courtroom verdict cannot reach. It is not a single dock of named accused. It is a scatter of people who sat in lectures, shared encrypted channels, attended weapons or explosives instruction in places later described as farms and guest-houses, or simply absorbed enough of the ISIS syllabus to be changed. Some were arrested in the wide net after April 2019 and later released without charge. Some were never identified at all. They are the unfinished human inventory of the attack.
The fifth layer: influenced, trained, still unaccounted
Radicalisation is not a switch. It is a staircase. At the bottom are the curious, young men drawn to a preacher who spoke of purity and grievance. A step above are those who accepted the takfiri claim that other Muslims were deficient and other faiths were fair game. Higher still are those who took an oath, swapped SIM cards, dropped their real names, and sat through multi-day military-style instruction. At the top are those who built the bombs and walked into churches. The Trial-at-Bar has dealt with people near the top. The staircase below them has never been fully surveyed.
The public record already tells us that the inner circle was larger than the eight or nine suicide cadres. Contemporary estimates put the core of the National Thowheeth Jama’ath in the region of a hundred to a hundred and fifty, while Zahran’s open-air sermons in the East drew crowds in the thousands. Training did not happen only in the imagination of investigators. Sites later identified in Kattankudy, Nuwara Eliya, Hambantota and elsewhere were used for firearms and explosives instruction. The American affidavit that charged three of the Sri Lankan accused described multi-day military-type trainings, recruitment, and a recovered ISIS curriculum, magazines, attack manuals, encrypted-app discipline. Some Sri Lankans had already gone towards the conflict in Syria. Ideology travelled faster than any passport.
After the attacks the State cast a wide net. Parliament was later told that hundreds were detained under detention orders in connection with Easter Sunday; the great majority were released without charge. That figure cuts two ways, and both ways matter. It confirms that many people were pulled into custody who should not have been treated as terrorists, kinship, a shared mosque, a phone contact, or communal panic was enough. It also confirms that the investigative picture of who was merely adjacent and who had actually walked part of the way up the staircase was never clean. Release without charge is not the same thing as an assessed, closed intelligence file. An acquittal in the main trial is not the same thing as deradicalisation.
Here is the operational problem. Sri Lankan law, as ministers have themselves stated in recent years, does not permit the State to compel rehabilitation merely because a person is suspected of holding extremist views. Detention and court-ordered programmes require an offence, or a judicial gateway. That protection of liberty is not a defect; it is the line that separates a republic from a suspicion-state. But it leaves a gap. The fifth layer lives in that gap: people who may have trained, pledged, or been groomed, who cannot now be lawfully warehoused, and who have not been offered, or required through a court, a serious pathway off the staircase.
If we are honest, we do not know how many such people there are. That ignorance is itself a national security finding. Networks regenerate from the unmapped middle, not from the men already serving two-hundred-year sentences. A trained man who was never charged does not become harmless because the news cycle has moved on. He becomes a dormant node, available to a new preacher, a new encrypted channel, a political entrepreneur, or a foreign handler who knows how to reopen an old wound.
Faith is not the accused. Extremism is.
Islam, as lived by the overwhelming majority of Sri Lankan Muslims for generations, is a faith of tawhid, mercy, restraint and neighbourliness. It is not a licence to impose a political reading of Sharia as state law on a country of Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims who have shared this island for centuries. Any ideology that claims a divine right to coerce a diverse population, or to treat other religions as enemies, is not the Islam of our parents and teachers. It is a political project that hijacked religious language.
The Qur’anic ethic that should have been heard most loudly after Easter Sunday is not vengeance and not silence. It is ‘adl, justice, and sabr, patience that is not passivity. Justice means that the guilty are punished after a fair trial, that the innocent are not held hostage to the crimes of a few, and that no community is made to pay a collective price. Patience means refusing the cheap invitation to hatred that was extended to every side after 2019: the invitation to Muslims to close ranks around the indefensible, and the invitation to others to treat two million citizens as a security problem.
Tolerance in a multi-religious country is not a slogan. It is a security doctrine. Sri Lanka has already paid, more than once, for the illusion that one community’s grievance or one community’s purity project can be solved by breaking the others. The Easter Sunday network was small. The damage it did to inter-communal trust was enormous. Rebuilding that trust is not an act of charity. It is an act of national defence.
Six years in the same jail is not a neutral fact
One fact should not be brushed aside in the relief of a verdict. For more than six years, men later found guilty and men later acquitted occupied the same custodial space. Prisons are not monasteries. They are places where ideas travel, hardline ideas especially. Anyone who has worked in intelligence or corrections knows that proximity to committed ideologues is itself a risk factor. The question is not theatrical. What influence did the hardliners exert on those who entered custody as moderates, family men, or peripheral accused? What conversations filled the years while the trial crawled forward?
The courtroom itself displayed the full human range. Some pleaded for mercy by citing family obligations. Some remained silent, wrapping themselves in what they called Islamic values. Some insisted they were innocent. Some pointed at others who, they said, were walking free after doing wrong. All of that is part of the record. The law has now sorted the convicted from the acquitted. What the law cannot do by itself is repair the minds that were shaped in those years.
Those who have been acquitted have every right to seek further legal remedies if they believe residual injustice remains. Those who have been convicted will appeal. That is the system working. But whoever is released into society, whether by acquittal now or by some future order, should not walk straight from the prison gate into the same social media, the same grievance networks, and the same political entrepreneurs who know how to harvest anger. A meaningful, professionally designed rehabilitation and reintegration programme is not a soft option. It is the difference between closing a case and closing a pipeline.
Rehabilitation in this context must do four things at once. It must deradicalise those already convicted who will spend the rest of their lives inside, so that the prison itself does not become a seminary. It must offer a voluntary, professionally designed pathway to those acquitted or released without charge who still carry the residue of the ideology. It must find — through intelligence, community reporting and due process, not through another indiscriminate sweep, the trained and half-trained who were never named. And it must give families and masjid communities the tools to recognise grooming when it returns in a new vocabulary, because it will try to return. Motivational factors are plentiful in today’s Sri Lanka: economic despair, online echo chambers, racial dog-whistles, and the permanent industry of “us versus them”.
Once bitten, twice shy – the duty of the Muslim leadership
The Muslim community cannot outsource this moment to the Attorney General and the police. Academics, professionals, entrepreneurs, trustees and the religious leadership have a positive duty — not a public-relations duty, to make sure that another generation of young men is not lost to a death-cult wearing our faith as a mask.
That duty has several concrete parts. Masjid administrations must know who is teaching, what is being taught, and which visiting preachers are importing political Takfiri content under the cover of “revival”. Parents and school communities must treat unexplained isolation, sudden contempt for other communities, and secretive online networks as warning signs, not as private piety. Community leaders must stop the reflex of denial that so often precedes tragedy: the claim that “this cannot happen among us” is how it happens among us. And those with standing must say, without hesitation, that a political Sharia project has no place in a constitutional, multi-religious Sri Lanka. Saying so is not a betrayal of Islam. It is a defence of it.
There is an equal duty on the other side of the communal line. Policy makers and law enforcement must distinguish the extremist from the ordinary believer, or they will manufacture the very alienation that recruiters need. Collective punishment, casual Islamophobia, and the theatrical raid that produces television pictures but no intelligence, are not security. They are recruitment material. The same is true of racial hatred that is systematically spread, sometimes manufactured, for political benefit. Division is a business. National security is the cost that the rest of us pay.
The fifth layer makes that duty specific. Identification of those who trained or were ideologically prepared, where evidence exists, must be followed by due process. Where the threshold for prosecution is not met but the risk is real, the answer cannot be either a second PTA dragnet or a polite pretence that the file is closed. It has to be a lawful, court-supervised or genuinely voluntary rehabilitation pathway, built with Muslim scholars who reject takfir, with psychologists who understand grooming, and with intelligence officers who know the difference between a sermon and a cell. No no Leaving grey-zone individuals unattended is how networks regenerate.
A lawful way to reach the fifth layer, without a second dragnet
What follows is not a new PTA, and it is not a community vigilante scheme. It is a four-door mechanism that can sit inside existing law: community referral, a judicial gateway, masjid-led correction, and a tightly governed intelligence list. Each door has a different threshold. Mixing the doors is how rights collapse and how real threats are missed.
| Door 1 — Community referral, not denunciation
Families, trustees, principals and employers need a confidential channel, to a named district panel, not to a television camera, when a young person shows the known marks of grooming: sudden isolation, contempt for other communities, secretive encrypted life, or unexplained travel and training. The first response is assessment by a mixed panel (a senior police officer who understands source protection, a psychologist, and a recognised alim who publicly rejects takfir). Most cases should end here as pastoral and family work. The panel must have no power of arrest. Door 2 — A court gateway when the risk is real Where assessment finds credible evidence of weapons or explosives training, an oath to a proscribed ideology, or preparation that stops just short of a completed offence, the file goes to a Magistrate, not to an executive camp. The court may then do one of three things: decline, because suspicion is not proof; send the person onto a time-bound rehabilitation order with review; or, if an offence is made out, commit the matter for prosecution. Liberty is decided by a judge. That is the line ministers have already drawn. Use it. Do not invent a parallel detention power and call it counselling. Door 3 — Masjid-led correction with professional spine Rehabilitation that is only a government lecture will fail. The content that pulled these men in was religiously coded; the content that pulls them out must be too, and it must be better scholarship. A standing roster of ulama, drawn from the recognised boards and from the universities, should teach the specific refutation of the ISIS reading: the prohibition of targeting civilians and places of worship, the nullity of self-appointed emirs, and the duty of loyalty to a multi-religious land in which Muslims are citizens, not a state-in-waiting. Psychologists and vocational officers sit beside the scholars. Duration is fixed. Progress is written. Families are in the room. A certificate without a changed mind is theatre. Door 4 — A watch-list with a sunset, not a blacklist Intelligence must keep a closed, graded list of persons assessed as trained, half-trained or still ideologically live. Graded means high, medium, residual, not a single stain. The list is not public. It is not a licence to harass a family at a checkpoint for sport. Every name carries a review date. Every name requires a named officer who owns the file. After a fixed period with no new adverse information, the name falls off. An unmanaged list becomes either a weapon against a community or a graveyard of forgotten warnings. Both outcomes helped produce 2019. |
Two safeguards must be written on the face of any such scheme or it will rot. First, community referral is never evidence by itself. A trustee’s anxiety is a reason to look, not a reason to lock. Second, the scheme is for the fifth layer, the influenced and the trained who sit below the threshold of the main indictment, not a second punishment for men already sentenced, and not a net for every bearded young man in the Eastern Province. If those two rules are broken, the mechanism becomes recruitment material for the next preacher.
Aftercare is the part governments forget. A man who finishes a six-month programme and is then returned to the same encrypted group, the same unemployed street and the same political entrepreneur has not been rehabilitated. He has been given a pause. District aftercare, a case officer, a masjid mentor, an employer who will take a risk, should run for at least a year after the formal order ends. The LTTE rehabilitation architecture, whatever else one thinks of it, understood that reintegration is a separate phase. We do not need to copy that model. We do need to remember the lesson.
The information war after the verdict
A second, quieter danger is already visible. The race among YouTubers and social-media bloggers to be first with a fragment of the judgement has produced more heat than light. Speed is not truth. Half a sentence from a three-judge bench, stripped of context and served with a communal caption, can undo in an afternoon the careful work of a five-year trial.
The larger concern is the citizen who is not on social media at all. Many such people have already concluded that “the Easter Sunday case is over,” because they saw pictures of convicts in prison buses and acquitted men walking free. They then ask, reasonably, what became of the planners. If the State and the responsible media do not answer that question with facts, that layers three and four remain under investigation, the vacuum will be filled by the loudest voice, not the most accurate one. Misinformation is not a side issue. In a country still living with the memory of 2019, it is a security vulnerability.
National security is the through-line
Every theme in this aftermath travels back to the same point. Intelligence that is received and not acted upon is not intelligence; it is paperwork. A community that will not police its own extremes will eventually be policed by others, clumsily. A political class that treats terror as a ladder will find that the ladder is still standing when the next crisis comes. A prison system that warehouses ideologues with the uncommitted is an unplanned academy. A media culture that rewards the first claim rather than the verified one will keep the public permanently one rumour away from panic.
The Trial-at-Bar has done its part on the first layer. The suicide cadres closed the second layer with their own hands. Layers three and four belong to investigators, prosecutors and, ultimately, to other benches. They must be allowed to finish that work without being drowned by commentary, and without being stalled by the very interests that benefited from the original shock. The fifth layer belongs to all of us at once. intelligence services that must map without persecuting, a legal system that must hold the line on liberty while not abandoning prevention, and a Muslim leadership that can reach people the State will never see until it is too late.
For the rest of us, the instruction is older than any statute. Once bitten, twice shy. Shyness here does not mean fear of our neighbours. It means vigilance without hatred; faith without political coercion; justice without collective blame; and rehabilitation that is real, not ceremonial. If the Muslim leadership, the religious establishments of every community, the police and the policy makers treat this verdict as a conclusion, we will have wasted the only thing the dead can still give us. a warning paid for in blood.
Wrongdoers must face the consequences. Those who maintain their innocence must have the full protection of the law. Those who return to society — and those who never entered a courtroom at all — must be helped, and where necessary watched, onto the right path. The planners must still answer. So must the quieter question that will decide whether 2019 remains a singular crime or becomes a method: who was trained, who was only influenced, who is still reachable, and who is still waiting for a new instruction. Until that accounting is complete, Easter Sunday is not a closed file. It is an open national security obligation. ( 26 sources)
(This analysis is offered in the interest of national security, institutional reform, and public safety)
The writer is a retired Senior Superintendent of Police who served as Deputy Director in charge of the Counter Terrorism Desk of the State Intelligence Service (2005–2009) and later as Intelligence Coordinator to the Inspector General of Police. He is the author of Security Beyond Enforcement: Practical Approaches for a Safer Nation. Email- mahildole54@gmail.com
