Wed 06 September 2023:
The government of Sri Lanka will establish a parliamentary committee to look into claims made in a British television broadcast that Sri Lankan intelligence was involved in the 269-person-death Easter Sunday explosions in 2019.
Manusha Nanayakkara, the minister of labor, promised the house on Tuesday that more information on the probe will be released soon.
A group of Sri Lankans inspired by the ISIL group carried out the six near-simultaneous suicide bombings in churches and tourist hotels on April 21, 2019.
“GRAND POLITICAL PLOT”: SRI LANKA CARDINAL SEEKS UN PROBE INTO 2019 EASTER BOMBINGS
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.
According to a individual interviewed in the Channel 4 footage aired on Tuesday, he arranged a meeting between a local ISIL (ISIS)-inspired group and a top state intelligence official to hatch a plot to create unrest in Sri Lanka and allow Gotabaya Rajapaksa to win the presidential election later that year.
Azad Maulana was a spokesman for a breakaway group of the Tamil Tiger rebels that later became a pro-state armed group and helped the government defeat the rebels and win Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war in 2009.
SRI LANKA ARRESTS TOP MUSLIM LEADER OVER 2019 EASTER ATTACKS
Rajapaksa was a top defence official during the war, and his older brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had been defeated in the 2015 elections after 10 years in power.
Fears about national security enabled Rajapaksa to sweep to power. He was forced to resign last year after mass protests over the country’s worst economic crisis.
In the Channel 4 programme, Maulana said he arranged a meeting in 2018 between ISIL-inspired fighters 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.
FOR SRI LANKA’S MUSLIMS, THE EASTER BOMBING ANNIVERSARY MARKS A YEAR OF SCAPEGOATING AND PERSECUTION
Maulana said Chandrakanthan had met the group in prison while in detention on allegations of murder and found they could be useful in creating insecurity in the country.
Maulana told Channel 4 that he did not attend the meeting, but that the intelligence officer later told him that instilling fear was the only way to restore the Rajapaksa family to power.
Maulana stated in the episode that once security camera footage of the explosions was published, he recognized the faces of the assailants carrying bomb-laden backpacks as those he had organized to meet with the intelligence officer.
According to Channel 4, Maulana was interviewed by UN investigators and European intelligence services about his claims.
Archbishop of Colombo Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith said that authorities had not acted on previous parliamentary and presidential commissions appointed to investigate the attacks.
Officers originally entrusted with investigating the attacks but transferred out by the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government should be brought back to assist, and the current group and those named by Channel 4 should have no role in the probe, Ranjith said.
“We sincerely hope that all those requests will be faithfully carried out by the … president and the government of Sri Lanka. Unless such a transparent and sincere investigation is launched, we do not feel truth and justice will be meted out to the innocent victims of the 2019 Easter attacks,” Ranjith said in a statement.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
______________________________________________________________
FOLLOW INDEPENDENT PRESS:
TWITTER (CLICK HERE)
https://twitter.com/IpIndependent
FACEBOOK (CLICK HERE)
https://web.facebook.com/ipindependent
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
