# The 2019 claim that a Muslim doctor in Sri Lanka secretly sterilized thousands of Buddhist women to shrink the Sinhalese population was a debunked, anti-Muslim conspiracy theory

**Verdict: Contradicted.** This is a false, anti-Muslim conspiracy theory, and it is rated Contradicted without qualification. In May 2019, weeks after the Easter Sunday bombings and amid mob violence against Sri Lanka's Muslim minority, a nationalist newspaper alleged that a Muslim obstetrician had covertly sterilized some 4,000 Sinhala Buddhist women during caesarean deliveries in order to shrink the majority population. No evidence ever supported the claim. Reuters reported it had no independent evidence for the allegations; Euronews carried the same wire account under the word “unsubstantiated.” The doctor, Segu Shihabdeen Mohamed Shafi, was arrested days later, held, released on bail, and in November 2024 acquitted of every charge by a Kurunegala magistrate after the Attorney General's Department told the court there was no evidence to proceed. Sri Lankan investigators later described the affair as a fabricated conspiracy against him. This file reports the smear as the debunked hoax it is, and centers the harm done to a wrongly accused, later-exonerated man; it never repeats the accusation as fact.

Category: Secret Societies & Power · Era: 2010s · First circulated: 23 May 2019, when the nationalist Sinhala-language daily Divaina ran a front-page article alleging mass covert sterilizations; the claim then spread through social media and nationalist politicians during the post-Easter-bombings panic · Believed by: Circulated by Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist media, some monks and politicians, and social-media accounts in mid-2019. Every reputable body that examined the claim, from Reuters to Sri Lanka's own Criminal Investigation Department to the courts, found no evidence for it; the medical and international press treated it as a communal hoax from the start.
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/sri-lanka-sterilization-conspiracy

## Summary
In the tense weeks after the April 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bombings, as Sinhala-Buddhist mobs attacked Muslim homes, mosques, and businesses in northwestern Sri Lanka, a nationalist newspaper published an incendiary claim: that a Muslim doctor at the Kurunegala Teaching Hospital had secretly sterilized around 4,000 Sinhala Buddhist women during caesarean sections, part of an alleged plot to make the Sinhalese “go extinct.” The story was false. Reuters found no independent evidence; Sri Lanka's Criminal Investigation Department told a court it had found nothing to support the allegations, and women examined by doctors were found not to have been sterilized. The accused physician, Dr. Segu Shihabdeen Mohamed Shafi, was nonetheless arrested, jailed, and vilified before being released on bail, reinstated, and finally acquitted of all charges in 2024. This file treats the sterilization claim as a debunked anti-Muslim conspiracy theory and documents the harm it did to an innocent man.

## The claim
That a Muslim obstetrician deliberately and secretly performed tubal-ligation sterilizations on thousands of unsuspecting Sinhala Buddhist women during caesarean deliveries, as part of a covert campaign, said to be coordinated with extremists, to suppress the birth rate of Sri Lanka's Buddhist majority and engineer the demographic decline of the Sinhalese.

## Origin and timeline
- 2019-04-21: Coordinated suicide bombings claimed by Islamic State strike three churches and three luxury hotels on Easter Sunday, killing about 269 people. The attacks trigger fear and a wave of hostility toward Sri Lanka's Muslim minority, roughly a tenth of the population, even though the bombers were a fringe cell repudiated by mainstream Muslim organizations.
- 2019-05: Anti-Muslim riots break out in the Northwestern Province, beginning around Chilaw and spreading through the region. Sinhala-Buddhist nationalist mobs attack Muslim-owned homes, shops, mosques, and vehicles; more than 500 Muslim properties are damaged or destroyed and at least one man is killed. Boycotts of Muslim businesses spread.
- 2019-05-23: Divaina, a nationalist Sinhala-language daily, publishes a front-page article alleging that a Muslim doctor had covertly sterilized around 4,000 Sinhala Buddhist women after caesarean deliveries. The claim, framed as a plot against the Sinhalese, races across social media.
- 2019-05-25: Dr. Segu Shihabdeen Mohamed Shafi, a prominent obstetrician at the Kurunegala Teaching Hospital, is arrested. Police initially cite suspected acquisition of property with money of dubious origin rather than any proven sterilization; further allegations of illicit wealth and terrorist links are attached to him.
- 2019-06-06: Reuters reports that it has no independent evidence to support the sterilization claims; the wire story runs widely, including on Euronews, under the heading that the claims are “unsubstantiated.” Shafi's lawyer, Faris Saly, says the investigation was flawed because authorities sought evidence of sterilizations only after the arrest, and calls the allegations baseless.
- 2019-07: After weeks in custody, Shafi is released on bail set at 2.75 million rupees. The Criminal Investigation Department subsequently informs the court that it found no evidence to support the sterilization allegations, noting that colleagues said such procedures could not have gone unnoticed by other staff.
- 2019: Medical examinations of women who had complained are carried out; those tested are found not to have been subjected to tubal ligation. Investigators later describe the case as a fabricated conspiracy against Shafi, and report that a hospital official had been aware the allegations were untrue.
- 2022: The government reinstates Shafi and moves to pay salary arrears for roughly three years of compulsory leave. He is reported to have pledged to donate the compensation, having maintained his innocence throughout.
- 2024-11-06: The Kurunegala Magistrate's Court, acting on advice from the Attorney General's Department that there was no evidence to proceed, acquits Dr. Shafi of all charges and lifts the travel ban against him. The exoneration closes a five-year ordeal built on a claim that was never substantiated.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: A Muslim doctor secretly sterilized thousands of Sinhala Buddhist women during caesarean sections.
  Evidence: No evidence has ever supported this. Reuters reported that it had no independent evidence for the claim, which originated in a single nationalist newspaper article. Sri Lanka's Criminal Investigation Department told the court it found nothing to substantiate the allegations, and women who were medically examined were found not to have been sterilized. The claim is false, and this file states it as false.
- Claim: The arrest proves the authorities had found real evidence of sterilization.
  Evidence: It does not. The doctor was arrested days after the newspaper story, but police initially cited suspected suspicious property dealings, not sterilization. His lawyer noted that investigators only began seeking evidence of sterilizations after the arrest, an order of events that points to a conclusion in search of proof rather than proof leading to a charge. An arrest amid a moral panic is not a finding of guilt.
- Claim: Thousands of specific victims came forward, so something must have happened.
  Evidence: The alleged figure of around 4,000 was an assertion in the press, not a documented tally of confirmed cases. When women who complained were actually examined by doctors, those tested were found not to have undergone tubal ligation. The gap between a dramatic round number in a headline and zero confirmed sterilizations is the whole story: the number was never evidence, it was rhetoric.
- Claim: This was a straightforward medical inquiry, not a communal witch-hunt.
  Evidence: The context makes that untenable. The claim surfaced weeks after the Easter bombings, during active anti-Muslim rioting in the very region where the doctor worked, and it targeted a Muslim physician in a Sinhala-Buddhist heartland. It fit a preexisting nationalist narrative about Muslims plotting demographic takeover. Investigators later characterized the affair as a fabricated conspiracy against him, consistent with a scapegoating driven by fear rather than a good-faith medical probe.
- Claim: The courts left the question open, so the doctor might still be guilty.
  Evidence: They did not leave it open. In November 2024 the Kurunegala Magistrate's Court acquitted Shafi of all charges after the Attorney General's Department advised that there was no evidence to proceed, and the travel ban on him was lifted. Combined with his earlier reinstatement and payment of salary arrears, the legal record is one of exoneration, not unresolved suspicion.
- Claim: The sterilization story was harmless rumor that hurt no one.
  Evidence: The opposite is true. It helped inflame anti-Muslim violence that damaged hundreds of Muslim properties, and it destroyed the reputation and livelihood of an innocent doctor who spent time in custody, lost roughly three years of work, and was publicly branded a mass criminal before being cleared. Real people were harmed by a claim that turned out to have no factual basis at all.
- Claim: Sri Lanka's Muslims were secretly waging a plot to shrink the Buddhist population.
  Evidence: This is the ideological core of the hoax, and it is a version of the same demographic-replacement myth used against minorities elsewhere: the false idea that a religious minority is covertly engineering the decline of a majority. No credible demographic or medical evidence supports it. Naming this lineage is not endorsing it; it is identifying the smear so readers can recognize it for what it is.

## Why people believe it
- Timing and fear did the persuading. The claim landed weeks after the Easter Sunday massacre, when grief and suspicion toward Muslims were at their height, so an accusation that a Muslim was covertly harming Buddhists slotted straight into an already primed emotional state.
- It matched a preexisting nationalist story. Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism has long circulated fears that the community is under demographic threat; a plot to sterilize Buddhist mothers gave that abstract anxiety a concrete villain and a specific mechanism, which made it feel explanatory rather than invented.
- A trusted outlet gave it a headline. Because the claim first appeared as a front-page newspaper story rather than an anonymous rumor, it arrived with borrowed credibility, and the subsequent arrest was read by many as official confirmation even though police had cited unrelated grounds.
- The specificity felt like proof. A precise-sounding figure, a named hospital, and the intimate setting of childbirth made the story vivid and repeatable, and vividness is easily mistaken for evidence when no one checks whether a single sterilization was ever confirmed.

## Open questions
- What is really going on here is not a medical mystery but the anatomy of a communal scapegoat: how a single unsourced newspaper claim, dropped into a moment of post-attack fear, became an arrest, a national panic, and years of ruin for an innocent man before the courts caught up.
- The persistence question is why the smear kept circulating even after Reuters, the CID, and medical examinations had all found nothing. Debunked communal claims often outlive their refutation because they serve a narrative, not a fact-finding need, and corrections rarely travel as far as the original accusation.
- A live accountability question remains: those who fabricated and amplified a false claim that helped fuel anti-Muslim violence and jailed an innocent doctor have largely not answered for it, and Shafi himself has spoken of pursuing action against those responsible.
- The broader pattern worth watching is how demographic-replacement myths recur across countries and target groups, adapting their details, sterilization here, birth rates or conversion elsewhere, while keeping the same false core that a minority is secretly plotting a majority's decline.

## Sources
- Unsubstantiated claims Muslim doctor sterilised women raise tensions in Sri Lanka, Euronews (Reuters) (2019): https://www.euronews.com/2019/06/06/unsubstantiated-claims-muslim-doctor-sterilised-women-raise-tensions-in-sri-lanka
- Unsubstantiated Claims Muslim Doctor Sterilized Women Raise Tensions in Sri Lanka, U.S. News & World Report (Reuters) (2019): https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2019-06-06/unsubstantiated-claims-muslim-doctor-sterilized-women-raise-tensions-in-sri-lanka
- Doctor held for ‘sterilizing’ women in Sri Lanka was framed: probe, Arab News (2019): https://www.arabnews.com/node/1521126
- Sri Lanka police uncover criminal conspiracy over sterilization claims, EconomyNext (2019): https://economynext.com/sri-lanka-police-uncover-criminal-conspiracy-over-sterilization-claims-15068/
- Dr. Shafi Sihabdeen acquitted of all charges, Newswire.lk (2024): https://www.newswire.lk/2024/11/06/dr-shafi-sihabdeen-acquitted-of-all-charges/
- Dr. Shafi Shihabdeen acquitted from all charges, Colombo Gazette (2024): http://colombogazette.com/2024/11/06/dr-shafi-shihabdeen-acquitted-from-all-charges/
- Court acquits Dr. Shafi of all charges, Daily Mirror (Sri Lanka) (2024): https://www.dailymirror.lk/breaking_news/Court-acquits-Dr-Shafi-of-all-charges/108-295373
- Exclusive: Sri Lanka doctor falsely accused of forced sterilisation to donate his compensation, EconomyNext (2022): https://economynext.com/exclusive-sri-lanka-doctor-falsely-accused-of-forced-sterilisation-to-donate-his-compensation-95720/
- Lankan govt reinstates doctor accused of sterilising over 4K Sinhalese women, The Tribune (India) (2022): https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/world/lankan-govt-reinstates-doctor-accused-of-sterilising-over-4k-sinhalese-women-351079/
- 2019 anti-Muslim riots in Sri Lanka, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_anti-Muslim_riots_in_Sri_Lanka

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