A Sri Lankan high court has convicted 15 men for their roles in the deadly Easter Sunday bombings of 2019, sentencing each to prison terms ranging from 200 to 260 years. The verdict, delivered Tuesday by a three-judge panel in the capital Colombo under heavy security, marks a milestone in one of the most complex and painful legal proceedings in the country's recent history. Nine other defendants were acquitted, and one died before the case reached trial.
The coordinated attacks on 21 April 2019 targeted three churches during Easter services and three luxury hotels across Sri Lanka, killing at least 267 people — including 45 foreign nationals from countries including India, Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, and Denmark — and wounding hundreds more. The nine suicide bombers who carried out the blasts all died. The attacks, inspired by the Islamic State (IS) group and attributed to two Sri Lanka-based Islamist militant groups, were among the deadliest in the country's history. Among those convicted is Naufer Moulavi, identified by prosecutors as a key mastermind of the plot. The 15 men, all from Sri Lanka's Muslim minority, were found guilty on charges including murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and weapons and explosives offences under the country's Prevention of Terrorism Act — a total of more than 23,000 charges. The court also ordered the confiscation of all their movable and immovable assets.
The trial, which spanned nearly five years, has brought partial relief to victims' families and survivors, but full closure remains elusive. Sri Lanka's Catholic Church has long maintained that the convicted men were not the true masterminds, and broader questions of state complicity persist. A parliamentary inquiry found that police and intelligence officials failed to act on repeated advance warnings — including a tip-off from India — before the attacks. In a separate case concluded in July, a former police chief and a former senior defence ministry official were sentenced to death for criminal negligence in ignoring those warnings; death sentences in Sri Lanka have not been carried out since 1976 and are typically commuted to life imprisonment. In 2023, the Supreme Court found former president Maithripala Sirisena responsible for security failures and ordered him to pay compensation to victims.
A further, potentially more explosive thread of the investigation remains unresolved. Suresh Sallay, a former intelligence chief and retired army major general, was arrested in February and is accused of orchestrating the bombings alongside the Islamist extremists — allegedly to sow chaos and boost the political fortunes of former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who won an election months after the attacks on a platform of combating Islamist extremism. These allegations were aired in a 2023 documentary by British broadcaster Channel 4, which included whistleblower testimony. Both Sallay and Rajapaksa deny any involvement. Rajapaksa, who later resigned from the presidency amid mass protests over an economic crisis, has been barred from leaving the country and has sought a court order to prevent his arrest in connection with the ongoing investigation.
For many Sri Lankans, Tuesday's verdict — though long awaited — represents only one chapter in a still-unfolding search for the full truth. "Finally, we have justice," said Catholic priest Jude Fernando. "It has taken a long time to get to this point." Whether those ultimately responsible for planning the attacks will ever be fully held to account remains an open question that continues to weigh on the island nation.