He said Chandrakanthan agreed to “use them” and that he later utilized his influence as a local politician, arranging for Maulana to help release Hashim by providing him with legal and financial assistance. He quoted Chandrakanthan as saying the group seemed “interesting” to him because they were only focused on dying, referring to the belief of some Muslim extremists that acts of perceived martyrdom can grant them paradise in the afterlife. Maulana said Chandrakanthan had met the brother of the leader of the extremist group in prison while the politician was detained on allegations of murder and found they could be useful in creating insecurity in the country.
The attacks killed 269 people, including worshippers at Easter Sunday services, locals and foreign tourists, and revived memories of frequent bombings during the quarter-century war.įears over national security enabled Gotabaya Rajapaksa to sweep to power until he was forced to resign in mid-2022 after mass protests over the country’s worst economic crisis. Rajapaksa was a top defense official during the war, and his older brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had been defeated in the 2015 elections after 10 years in power.Ī group of Sri Lankans inspired by the Islamic State group carried out the six near-simultaneous suicide bombings in churches and tourist hotels on April 21, 2019. Maulana said he arranged a meeting in 2018 between IS-inspired extremists and a top intelligence officer at the behest of his boss at the time, Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, the leader of the rebel splinter group-turned-political party. The man in the Channel 4 program, Azad Maulana, was a spokesperson for a breakaway group of the Tamil Tiger rebels that later became a pro-state militia and helped the Sinhalese-dominated government defeat the rebels and win Sri Lanka’s long civil war in 2009.
Premadasa stressed that justice should be delivered to the victims of the attack and therefore, there is a need for “a transparent international investigation to find out the truth about this attack.”
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