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

**No verdict.** The attack itself was carried out by a real local Islamist group, and the intelligence failures around it are documented by an official commission. But the further claim, that elements of the state deliberately enabled or orchestrated the bombings for political gain, is a serious, still-open allegation raised by credible figures including the Archbishop of Colombo. No investigation has established it as fact, and no court has ruled on it, so it sits as unproven, neither confirmed nor cleanly ruled out.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: 2010s · First circulated: 2019 · Believed by: Pressed publicly by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith and Sri Lanka's Catholic Church; amplified worldwide by a 2023 UK Channel 4 documentary
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/sri-lanka-easter-2019-plot

## Summary
On Easter Sunday 2019, coordinated suicide bombers struck three churches and three luxury hotels in Sri Lanka, killing some 269 people. A local group inspired by the Islamic State carried out the attack, and repeated foreign intelligence warnings beforehand went unacted upon. From those documented facts a graver claim has grown: that parts of the state did not merely fail but deliberately let the plot proceed, or helped steer it, to spread fear and lift Gotabaya Rajapaksa into the presidency months later. The negligence is established. The orchestration is alleged, uninvestigated to a conclusion, and rated here as unproven.

## The claim
That the April 2019 Easter Sunday bombings were not simply an act of Islamist terrorism compounded by official negligence, but a 'grand political plot' in which elements of Sri Lanka's intelligence or security apparatus knowingly enabled, protected, or helped orchestrate the attackers, so that the resulting terror would deliver the November 2019 presidential election to Gotabaya Rajapaksa as a strongman 'national security' candidate.

## Origin and timeline
- 2019-04-04: Indian intelligence passes Sri Lanka a specific warning of imminent attacks on churches, naming the local group and its leader. Further alerts follow in the days before Easter. The warnings are documented but not acted upon at the top of the security establishment.
- 2019-04-21: On Easter Sunday, near-simultaneous suicide bombings tear through three churches and three luxury hotels, killing roughly 269 people, among them dozens of children and foreign nationals, and wounding hundreds more. The Islamic State claims the attack; investigators tie it to the local National Thowheeth Jama'ath and its leader, Zahran Hashim.
- 2019-04-24: Three days after the bombings, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a former wartime defence secretary, announces he will seek the presidency, campaigning heavily on national security.
- 2019-10: A parliamentary select committee faults President Maithripala Sirisena, the intelligence chief, and other officials for the failure to act on the warnings, describing a security apparatus paralysed by a feud between the president and prime minister.
- 2019-11: Gotabaya Rajapaksa wins the presidential election, campaigning as the candidate who can keep the country safe. Critics later argue the attacks manufactured exactly the fear his platform answered.
- 2021-02: The Presidential Commission of Inquiry reports, recommending the attorney general consider criminal proceedings against former president Sirisena and finding intelligence chief Nilantha Jayawardena criminally liable for failing to act on and 'diluting' the warnings. The commission documents grave negligence; it does not establish a deliberate plot.
- 2022: Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, escalates his public demand for the full truth, calls the attack a 'grand political plot,' and seeks an international or UN-backed inquiry. Pope Francis publicly urges Sri Lanka to reveal who was behind it.
- 2023-09: Britain's Channel 4 airs a 'Dispatches' documentary in which a whistleblower alleges he arranged a 2018 meeting between the bombers' network and a senior military-intelligence figure to engineer insecurity and boost Rajapaksa. The government opens a new committee to examine the claims; Rajapaksa calls them a 'tissue of lies.'
- 2024–2026: A new government under President Anura Kumara Dissanayake reinvigorates the investigation. The former intelligence chief Suresh Salley is dismissed, then arrested in early 2026 on conspiracy and aiding-and-abetting allegations he denies; Rajapaksa is treated as a person of interest. No orchestration verdict has been reached.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Specific warnings were ignored, which only makes sense if someone wanted the attack to happen.
  Evidence: The warnings were real and detailed: Indian intelligence flagged the threat weeks ahead, naming the group. But the official record offers a documented non-sinister explanation for the inaction. The Presidential Commission and a parliamentary committee described a state paralysed by a personal feud between President Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, a National Security Council that had effectively stopped meeting, and officials who downgraded the threat. Grave negligence and dysfunction are established; that intent lay behind the inaction is inferred, not shown.
- Claim: Gotabaya Rajapaksa benefited from the attacks, which proves his camp engineered them.
  Evidence: He did benefit. He declared his candidacy three days later, ran as the security strongman, and won. But benefiting from an event is not the same as causing it, and 'who gained' is a lead to investigate, not a finding. Analysts note the Rajapaksa camp's political revival was already underway before Easter. The cui bono logic is genuinely suggestive and is why serious people keep asking questions; on its own it does not establish that anyone in his orbit facilitated the bombing.
- Claim: A whistleblower says a state intelligence officer met the bombers in advance to hatch the plot.
  Evidence: In the 2023 Channel 4 film, Hanzeer Azad Maulana, a former paramilitary media and finance operative who fled Sri Lanka, says he brokered a 2018 meeting between the attackers' network and a senior military-intelligence figure. He reportedly gave testimony to European intelligence services and the UN. The account is serious enough to have triggered official probes, but it is a single insider's testimony, uncorroborated in public by hard evidence, from a witness with his own contested history. The officer he named produced documents asserting he was out of the country on the relevant dates.
- Claim: The attackers had prior contact with the intelligence services, so the state was steering them.
  Evidence: Some figures in the local extremist milieu had indeed come to the attention of, or had contact with, Sri Lankan intelligence before 2019, which is part of why the failure-to-act is so damning. But intelligence agencies routinely monitor, penetrate, and cultivate informants inside extremist groups; contact is what surveillance looks like. Whether any such relationship crossed from watching into enabling is precisely the open question the current investigation is meant to resolve, and has not.
- Claim: This was a real Islamist suicide attack by committed jihadists, which argues against a state plot.
  Evidence: The perpetrators were members of a genuine local jihadist network, the National Thowheeth Jama'ath, led by the radical preacher Zahran Hashim, who died in the attack; the Islamic State claimed it and featured him in a video. Officials have said the plot was in preparation since around 2017. A committed, ideologically driven cell with international jihadist ties is not obviously a state creation. The plot theory does not require the bombers to be fake, only that some official knew and let it run, which is harder to prove and remains unproven.

## Why people believe it
- The negligence is so total it strains innocent explanation. When warnings this specific are ignored at every level, the mind reaches for intent, because sheer incompetence can feel less believable than design, even when the record documents exactly that incompetence.
- The timing is stark. A former defence chief announced his run three days after the carnage, campaigned on safety, and won. A sequence that clean invites the suspicion that the fear was not incidental to the campaign but useful to it.
- The messenger is credible and persistent. This is not an anonymous forum theory; it is pressed by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, who buried his own parishioners and has demanded the truth for years, and it was amplified by a mainstream British broadcaster and echoed by the Pope.
- Official accounts have shifted and stalled. Successive governments have been accused of shielding named officers, shelving reports, and slow-walking justice, and every delay reads to grieving families as confirmation that something is being hidden.
- Sri Lanka has a real history of security-state manipulation and impunity, from the long civil war onward, which makes 'the state let this happen for power' feel less like a leap than a pattern.

## Open questions
- Why were repeated, specific foreign warnings not acted upon at any level of the security establishment? Dysfunction and a leadership feud are documented, but whether inaction anywhere shaded from failure into deliberate permission has never been resolved to a conclusion.
- Did the alleged pre-attack meeting between an intelligence figure and the bombers' network actually happen? The whistleblower's account drives the orchestration claim; it is uncorroborated in public and directly disputed, and no adjudicated finding exists either way.
- What was the true nature of any prior contact between Sri Lankan intelligence and figures in the extremist network? Monitoring and informant relationships are ordinary; whether any relationship here crossed into enabling is the crux the current prosecution is meant to test.
- Will the investigations reopened after 2024, including the arrest of a former intelligence chief, produce evidence of orchestration, or confirm only negligence? Until a court rules, the gap between documented failure and alleged plot stays open.

## Sources
- Sri Lanka to probe allegation of intelligence complicity in 2019 bombings, Al Jazeera (2023): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/6/sri-lanka-to-probe-allegation-of-intelligence-complicity-in-2019-bombings
- Channel 4 Documentary Reveals Sri Lanka's Political Divisions, The Diplomat (2023): https://thediplomat.com/2023/09/channel-4-documentary-reveals-sri-lankas-political-divisions/
- Sri Lanka's Easter Blasts Probe Enters the Intelligence Architecture, The Diplomat (2026): https://thediplomat.com/2026/06/sri-lankas-easter-blasts-probe-enters-the-intelligence-architecture/
- Probe finds Sri Lanka ex-president should face charges, Al Jazeera (2021): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/23/probe-finds-sri-lanka-ex-president-should-face-charges
- Sri Lanka spy chief, president blamed for Easter attack lapses, Al Jazeera (2019): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/24/sri-lanka-spy-chief-president-blamed-for-easter-attack-lapses
- Sri Lanka cardinal seeks UN probe into 2019 Easter bombings, Al Jazeera (2022): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/8/sri-lanka-cardinal-seeks-un-probe-into-2019-easter-bombings
- Sri Lanka's former intelligence chief arrested over 2019 Easter attacks, Al Jazeera (2026): https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/25/sri-lankas-former-intelligence-chief-arrested-over-2019-easter-attacks
- Islamic State's Easter Sunday Attacks in Sri Lanka: Assessing the Government's Response Two Years On, The Jamestown Foundation (2021): https://jamestown.org/islamic-states-easter-sunday-attacks-in-sri-lanka-assessing-the-governments-response-two-years-on/
- Sri Lanka's president will appoint a committee to probe claims of complicity in 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, Associated Press (via PBS NewsHour) (2023): https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/sri-lankas-president-will-appoint-committee-to-probe-claims-of-complicity-in-2019-easter-sunday-bombings

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