Explained | Did Sri Lanka's Rajapaksa orchestrate Easter bombings of 2019 for return to power?

Sri Lanka's previous government led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been accused of orchestrating Easter attacks of April 2019 by a whistleblower. The latest accusation over the cause of attack in which six suicide bombers targeted churches and luxury hotels across the country was made in a documentary for Channel 4’s Dispatches. Sri Lanka's Easter bombings of 2019, the worst terrorist attack in the history of the South Asian island nation, killed 269 people and shook Sri Lanka from a peacetime limbo for the first time since the end of its civil war in 2009.

The whistleblower further alleged that the attacks were orchestrated to "create instability in Sri Lanka", so that the Rajapaksa's — the most powerful political dynasty who dominated the country's economy in the 2010s — would win the presidential elections in 2019, reports The Guardian.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa won Sri Lanka's presidential elections at the end of 2019. But by the first half of 2022, Sri Lanka went through a phase of rare economic instability, partly due to Covid pandemic and the way Rajapaksa threw the weight of Sri Lankan economy around high-interest Chinese loans.

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Rajapaksa was forced to flee the country due to a popular uprising following which — in July 2022 — Colombo's corridors of power came under President Ranil Wickremesinghe. Rajapaksa's successor managed to bring about a semblance of economic stability in the country through interest-free credit lines from multilateral financial institutions and countries such as neighbouring India.

Investigation into Sri Lanka's Easter bombings: Five years on

Over five years on, an investigation has failed to provide any answers for how the attacks took place.

No criminal convictions have been made so far.

People previously involved in the investigation as well as the leader of Sri Lanka’s Catholic church, have alleged that inquiries were repeatedly sabotaged and obstructed by the Rajapaksa government.

So far, more than 200 people have been charged in the investigation. But no convictions have been made so far.

The Sri Lankan government at the time did not clarify how a number of high-level warnings about the April 2019 Easter attacks were ignored, including by the Indian intelligence.

In January, former president Maithripala Sirisena, who was in power at the time of the attacks, was ordered by the Supreme Court to pay millions in compensation to the victims.

Inside Sri Lanka's Easter attacks: What documentary claims?

The person cited in the Channel4 documentary claimed that he had helped an intelligence officer with close ties to the Rajapaksa family meet members of the local Islamist group, National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ), that carried out the attack.

The person further claims that theplan was hatched over a couple of years to create an "unsafe" security situation that would help bring Rajapaksa backto power.

Also watch |Did Gotabaya Rajapaksa allow the Easter bombing?

The Rajapaksa family had ruled Sri Lanka for almost a decade from 2005. While they are credited with ending its bloody, 26-year-long civil war but their alleged use of "death squads" to target critics and journalists gave them widespread notoriety.

Mahinda Rajapaksa was ousted in 2015 after a backlash against alleged corruption, but the family had planned a return to power in the 2019 election, this time with younger brother Gotabaya as the presidential candidate.

Ravi Seneviratne, the former director general of police who initially led the Easter attacks investigation, told The Guardian that after Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected president, the government had "prevented the investigation".

Also watch |Did Gotabaya Rajapaksa allow the easter bombing?

He claimed his team had already "established links" between state and military intelligence officers and the NTJ suicide bombers.

But when Rajapaksa took office by the end of 2019, Seneviratne’s entire team at CID was taken off the case.

More than 20 of his officers were transferred without his approval and travel bans were imposed on all 700 CID officers.

"The motive was to make them too scared to send a message. Many were too scared to work and some people even applied for transfers out of CID," Seneviratne told the publication.

Sri Lanka's defence into documentary's accusations

After the Dispatches revelations, the Sri Lankan government said it had set up a special parliamentary committee to probe the allegations.

Sri Lanka's Defence Ministry in September defended the country's intelligence chief, saying it “vehemently denounces the accusation of orchestrating the attack and assisting the bombers against a dedicated senior military officer who has served the nation for 36 years.”

The move came days after ousted former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa denied the alleged role of Major General Sallay in the bombings and that he had benefited from the attacks to win the presidential election in November 2019.