Sri Lanka's 2019 Easter Sunday bombings were a 'grand plot' enabled or orchestrated by state intelligence to help Gotabaya Rajapaksa win the presidency

The documented record, and the case for a plot

Take the suspicion in its strongest form, because it is not built on nothing. Start with what official bodies have themselves found. A Presidential Commission of Inquiry, reporting in 2021, recommended that the attorney general consider criminal proceedings against the sitting president at the time, Maithripala Sirisena, and found the intelligence chief, Nilantha Jayawardena, criminally liable for failing to act on the warnings and for “diluting” their weight. A parliamentary committee had already faulted the same leadership. These are not fringe accusations; they are the conclusions of the state's own inquiries.

Layer the politics on top. Three days after the bombings, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former wartime defence secretary, declared his candidacy for the presidency and campaigned as the man who could keep the country safe. Seven months later he won. To critics, the attack manufactured precisely the fear his platform was built to answer, and a sequence that tidy is hard to wave away as coincidence.

Then came the testimony. In September 2023, Britain's Channel 4 aired a “Dispatches” documentary in which a whistleblower, Hanzeer Azad Maulana, said he had personally arranged a 2018 meeting between the attackers' network and a senior military-intelligence figure, to engineer insecurity that would benefit the Rajapaksas. Maulana, who fled the country, reportedly gave his account to European intelligence services and the United Nations. And the moral weight behind the demand for answers is unusual: Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the Archbishop of Colombo who buried his own parishioners, has for years called the bombing a “grand political plot,” pressed for an international inquiry, and been publicly backed by Pope Francis in asking Sri Lanka to reveal the truth. When the accusers include the country's senior Catholic churchman and a mainstream broadcaster, the claim cannot be dismissed as noise.

Why orchestration is not established

For all that, the leap from documented failure to deliberate orchestration is exactly that: a leap, and the evidence has not yet been made to carry it. Begin with the perpetrators. They were not hollow figures conjured by a spy agency; they were members of a real jihadist network with a radical preacher at its head, tied to the Islamic State, which claimed the attack independently. Officials have said the plot was in preparation from around 2017. A committed ideological cell that was plotting mass murder on its own account is not obviously anyone's puppet.

The failure-to-act, meanwhile, has a mundane and heavily documented explanation that does not require malice. The president and prime minister of the day were locked in a bitter feud; the National Security Council had effectively stopped convening; the warnings were passed down but downgraded and mishandled by officials who did not treat the threat as urgent. Catastrophic dysfunction can produce the same outcome as a plot, an attack that should have been stopped and was not, without anyone having willed it. The commissions found that dysfunction; they did not find intent.

The strongest single piece of the plot case, the whistleblower's account of a meeting between intelligence and the bombers, remains one insider's testimony, uncorroborated in public by hard evidence, from a man with a contested paramilitary past and reasons of his own. The officer he named produced documents asserting he was abroad on the relevant dates. That some extremists had earlier come into contact with intelligence is real, but monitoring and running informants inside such groups is ordinary tradecraft; contact is what surveillance looks like, and it is not the same as facilitation. Crucially, no court has ruled that orchestration occurred. Even the 2026 arrest of a former intelligence chief rests on allegations, including failure to act, that he denies and that remain to be tested.

Why the plot reading takes hold

It is worth naming why this particular suspicion is so durable, and why it is not the usual conspiracy reflex. The negligence is so complete that innocent explanation strains under it: when alerts this exact are waved through at every level, the mind reaches for intent, because pure incompetence can feel less plausible than design, even when the record documents the incompetence in detail. The timing sharpens the pull. A defence-chief candidate announced his run three days after the carnage, campaigned on safety, and won; a sequence that clean invites the reading that the fear was useful rather than incidental.

Two further things keep the theory alive where an ordinary rumour would fade. The messengers are credible and will not stop: a cardinal who buried the dead, a mainstream broadcaster, a pope. And the state has behaved in ways that feed distrust, with accusations of shielded officers, shelved reports, and stalled justice across successive governments, so that every delay reads to grieving families as proof of a cover-up. Set against a country with a real history of security-state impunity, “they let it happen for power” does not feel like a fantasy; it feels like a pattern. None of that makes the plot true. It explains why serious people refuse to let the question drop, and why they are right not to.