Sri Lanka’s president to look into bombing claims made in UK TV programme

Sri Lanka’s president has said he will appoint a committee chaired by a retired supreme court judge to investigate allegations made in a UK television report that the South Asian country’s intelligence was complicit in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings that killed 269 people.

The attacks, which included simultaneous suicide bombings, targeted three churches and three tourist hotels. The dead included 42 foreigners from 14 countries.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s decision to appoint a committee headed by a judge to investigate claims that Sri Lankan intelligence had a hand in the bombings that were carried out by Islamic militants came under pressure from opposition lawmakers, religious leaders, activists as well as the victims’ relatives. They say that previous investigations failed to reveal the truth behind the bombings.

The committee’s primary mission is to investigate the “serious allegations recently brought to light by Channel 4 in a broadcast video”, the president’s office said in a statement on Sunday. It said that the “allegations have added fuel to the fire”.

The statement said that a former attorney general “has made similar claims, suggesting the existence of a mastermind behind the devastating Easter bomb attack”. It said that a parliamentary committee would separately investigate and “address these concerns comprehensively”.

In a programme broadcast on Tuesday, Channel 4 interviewed a man who said he had arranged a meeting between a local so-called Islamic State-inspired group, National Thowheed Jamath, and a top state intelligence official loyal to former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to formulate a plot to create instability and enable Mr Rajapaksa, a former senior defence official, to win the 2019 presidential election.

Mr Rajapaksa was forced to resign in mid-2022 after mass protests over the country’s worst economic crisis.

Mr Rajapaksa has denied the allegations against him, saying that the claim that “a group of Islamic extremists launched suicide attacks in order to make me president is absurd”.