By: Ovindi Vishmika

September 24, Colombo (LNW): The conviction of 15 men in Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday attacks trial closes one of the country’s longest and most consequential terrorism cases. But for survivors, grieving families and a nation still asking who knew what before 21 April 2019, the verdict is a milestone rather than the end of the story.

Seven years after Easter Sunday was transformed from a day of worship and celebration into one of the darkest mornings in Sri Lanka’s post-war history, a three-judge High Court Trial-at-Bar finally delivered its verdict.

Fifteen of the 24 accused who stood trial were found guilty. Nine were acquitted and ordered to be released.

The case had become almost synonymous with the extraordinary scale of the tragedy and the painfully slow pursuit of accountability. The prosecution had brought more than 23,270 charges, while 2,309 witnesses testified during proceedings that lasted nearly five years. The trial finally concluded on 24 August 2026, with the verdict delivered in Colombo on 22 September.

The court subsequently imposed lengthy terms of rigorous imprisonment on the 15 convicted men, ranging from 200 to 260 years, and ordered the confiscation of their movable and immovable property.

For the victims’ families, the numbers are almost impossible to comprehend.

For the country, however, the significance of the judgment lies not merely in the length of the sentences. It lies in what the judgment establishes and equally in what it does not.

A crime that changed Sri Lanka

On 21 April 2019, suicide bombers attacked three churches and three hotels in a coordinated operation that struck worshippers and foreign visitors in Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa.

The churches were St Anthony’s Shrine in Kochchikade, St Sebastian’s Church in Katuwapitiya and Zion Church in Batticaloa. The hotels targeted included the Shangri-La, Cinnamon Grand and Kingsbury in Colombo.

The attackers themselves died in the explosions. The subsequent investigation focused on the network surrounding the bombers and on those accused of facilitating, supporting and conspiring in the attacks.

The bombings were linked to Sri Lankan Islamist extremist networks inspired by the Islamic State. The attacks killed more than 260 people and injured more than 500, with dozens of foreign nationals among the dead. Different official and media accounts have cited somewhat different casualty totals over the years, reflecting later revisions and differing definitions of deaths connected to the attacks.

What is beyond dispute is the scale of the devastation.

Families lost parents, children and siblings. Entire households disappeared in seconds. Survivors were left with permanent injuries and trauma. The attacks also shattered the sense of security that had returned to Sri Lanka after the end of the civil war a decade earlier.

The Easter bombings were therefore not simply another terrorist incident. They represented a profound national rupture.

The extraordinary trial

The case before the High Court was itself extraordinary.

The Attorney General indicted 25 people in 2021. One accused died during the proceedings, leaving 24 defendants at the time of judgment. The prosecution presented 2,309 witnesses and pursued 23,270 charges involving allegations including conspiracy, aiding and abetting, possession and collection of weapons and explosives, and other offences connected with the attacks.

The sheer volume of evidence helps explain why the proceedings stretched over years.

The verdict therefore represents the conclusion of a judicial process that demanded an enormous amount of time and institutional effort.

The court ultimately determined that the prosecution had proved its case beyond reasonable doubt against 15 defendants. Nine others were acquitted.

That distinction is important.

A criminal trial is not a referendum on public suspicion, political narratives or collective anger. It is a determination of whether the evidence before the court satisfies the legal threshold required for conviction.

The acquittals are therefore as much a part of the judgment as the convictions.

Naufer Moulavi and the question of leadership

Among those convicted is Mohamed Naufer Moulavi, identified by prosecutors as a key figure in the network behind the attacks.

His conviction carries particular significance because the direct perpetrators of the Easter bombings did not survive. The prosecution’s case against those now convicted consequently concerned the wider network of people alleged to have helped create, support or facilitate the operation.

That distinction matters when discussing the word “mastermind”.

The verdict establishes criminal responsibility against the men convicted in this case. It should not automatically be interpreted as a judicial finding that every outstanding question about the ultimate planning, sponsorship or wider circumstances of the attacks has been answered.

Indeed, the reaction to the verdict demonstrates precisely why the distinction remains important.

Justice and the limits of justice

For victims’ families, the verdict has inevitably brought a measure of relief.

The years of waiting have been almost as painful as the original crime. Some families spent seven years wondering whether the state would ever reach a definitive judicial conclusion.

Catholic clergy and victims’ representatives have welcomed the convictions as an important step. But they have also stressed that the wider search for truth must continue.

That apparent contradiction,welcoming the verdict while saying the case is not over,captures the peculiar nature of the Easter Sunday tragedy.

There are at least three different questions.

First: Who committed and facilitated the attacks?

The trial has now produced convictions against 15 defendants.

Second: Why were the attacks able to happen?

That question leads to intelligence failures, institutional weaknesses and failures of coordination.

Third: Were there people beyond those convicted who knew about, enabled or otherwise contributed to the circumstances surrounding the attacks?

That remains the subject of continuing investigations and allegations.

A verdict in one criminal case cannot, by itself, answer all three questions.

The intelligence warnings

One of the most enduring features of the Easter Sunday story is that Sri Lankan authorities had received warnings before the attacks.

Investigations and subsequent inquiries examined intelligence alerts concerning possible attacks, including information originating from India. The failure to translate those warnings into effective preventive action became one of the central issues surrounding the tragedy.

That failure has already produced consequences beyond the current terrorism trial.

Former President Maithripala Sirisena was previously ordered by Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court to pay compensation to victims after the court found him responsible for security failures. In July 2026, former Inspector General of Police Pujith Jayasundara and former Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando were also sentenced to death for criminal negligence relating to the failure to act on intelligence warnings.

Sri Lanka has maintained a moratorium on executions for decades, meaning that the practical consequences of such sentences are different from their formal wording.

These cases underscore an uncomfortable reality:responsibility for preventing a terrorist attack and responsibility for committing a terrorist attack are legally distinct questions.

The latest verdict addresses the latter much more directly.

The question that refuses to disappear

But there is another question that has remained politically explosive:

Was the Easter Sunday massacre entirely the work of the extremist network that carried it out, or did others know more than has so far been established in court?

Allegations of a wider conspiracy have circulated for years. They intensified after a 2023 Channel 4 documentary aired allegations concerning links between elements of the security establishment and Islamist extremists.

Those allegations have been denied by the individuals and political figures implicated.

More recently, former State Intelligence Service chief Major General (retd.) Suresh Sallay has been arrested and investigated in connection with allegations concerning the attacks. He has denied wrongdoing. Former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has likewise denied allegations of involvement.

These matters must be treated as allegations unless and until established by competent judicial or investigative processes.

The existence of an investigation is not proof of guilt.

That principle is particularly important in a case that has become deeply politicised.

The shadow of politics

The Easter attacks occurred in April 2019.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected president only months later, campaigning heavily on national security and a promise of stronger action against Islamist extremism.

That chronology has inevitably fuelled political debate over the attacks.

Some investigators, activists and church representatives have argued that a broader conspiracy may have existed and that the perpetrators convicted in the latest trial represent only one layer of the story.

Others reject that interpretation and maintain that the attacks were the product of home-grown Islamist radicalisation, compounded by failures within the state security apparatus.

The latest court verdict does not, on the evidence publicly available so far, settle that wider political dispute.

That is precisely why the distinction between what a court has established and what political actors or investigators allege matters so greatly.

The rule of law cannot depend on which theory is politically convenient.

A divided verdict

There is another significant element of the judgment that deserves attention: nine defendants were acquitted.

In a case carrying enormous public emotion, acquittal is not necessarily evidence that the tragedy has been forgotten or that the prosecution’s overall case was meaningless.

It is evidence of something more fundamental about criminal justice: each accused person must be judged according to the evidence against that individual.

The court’s decision to convict 15 while acquitting nine demonstrates that the Trial-at-Bar did not treat the defendants as an undifferentiated group.

That distinction will matter in any assessment of the judgment’s legal significance.

What does the verdict actually achieve?

The most immediate achievement is accountability.

Fifteen men have now been judicially found guilty in relation to the Easter Sunday attacks and given substantial prison sentences. Their property has also been ordered confiscated.

The verdict also establishes a formal judicial record after years in which public debate was dominated by competing narratives.

But justice has several dimensions.

There is punishment.

There is accountability.

There is truth.

There is institutional reform.

And there is closure.

The verdict clearly advances the first two.

Whether it delivers the final two remains an open question.

Closure may be the wrong word

For families who lost loved ones, “closure” can sound deceptively simple.

A conviction cannot bring back a child killed at church.

It cannot restore a family whose parents were both killed.

It cannot reverse the injuries carried by survivors.

And it cannot erase the memory of an Easter morning when ordinary acts of worship became scenes of mass death.

What a court can do is establish responsibility according to law.

That is important.

But it is not the same as healing.

The danger of forgetting the warning signs

Perhaps the most important lesson from the Easter Sunday tragedy is not the length of the sentences.

It is the failure that preceded the explosions.

The bombers did not emerge from nowhere.

The investigations into the attacks have documented a process of radicalisation, the development of extremist networks, the movement of individuals towards violent ideology and the accumulation of intelligence concerning possible threats.

The state had opportunities to intervene.

The tragedy demonstrated what happens when warning systems exist but institutions fail to convert warnings into timely action.

That lesson extends beyond terrorism.

Intelligence is useful only when it reaches the people empowered to act, when agencies trust one another, when political considerations do not paralyse security decisions, and when institutions possess the capacity to distinguish genuine threats from noise.

Seven years on

The Easter Sunday attacks belong simultaneously to Sri Lanka’s past and its present.

They belong to the past because the immediate perpetrators are dead, the trial has ended and convictions have finally been secured.

But they remain part of the present because investigations continue, questions about intelligence failures remain politically and legally significant, and survivors continue to live with the consequences.

The 2026 verdict therefore deserves to be understood neither as the definitive answer to every question surrounding Easter Sunday nor as an insignificant legal formality.

It is a major judicial milestone.

It says that, after one of the most devastating crimes in Sri Lanka’s modern history, a court has examined an enormous body of evidence and found 15 defendants criminally responsible.

It also says something else, perhaps unintentionally:

A verdict can establish responsibility without necessarily exhausting the search for truth.

For the families who have waited seven years, the convictions may finally mark the beginning of a different chapter.

The question now is whether Sri Lanka will have the institutional courage to pursue the remaining questions with the same seriousness regardless of where the evidence leads.

Because the ultimate measure of justice after Easter Sunday cannot simply be how many years the convicted men spend behind bars.

It must also be whether Sri Lanka learns why the warnings were missed, why the institutions failed, and whether the country is better prepared to ensure that another Easter morning never becomes another national tragedy.

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