MONETABRIEF – The Colombo High Court Trial-at-Bar is widely expected to hand down capital punishment to those who are likely to be convicted Tuesday out of the 24 suspects charged with Sri Lanka’s worst single terror attack against civilians.

A total of 23,270 charges were filed against 25 suspects – all from the minority Muslim community – on October 4, 2021 over the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, which killed 279 people, including 45 foreigners. One accused had died while in custody.

The case is closely watched as foreigners from Australia, Bangladesh, China, Denmark, India, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States were among the victims.

This trial-at-bar is also the first criminal prosecution directly linked to the atrocity.

Eleven months before Sri Lanka’s then Attorney-General, Sanjay Rajaratnam, indicted the suspects, the United States Justice Department had filed charges against three of them in California.

Among the five US citizens killed in the attacks on April 21 2019 against three hotels and three churches in Sri Lanka was a Department of Commerce employee who had travelled to Colombo on official business.

During nearly five years of proceedings before the three-judge court, a record 2,309 witnesses were listed. It took several months for the charges made out in Sinhala to be translated into English and Tamil, as requested by the accused.

The accused, charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), faced allegations of murder and attempted murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, aiding and abetting, and possessing and handling firearms and explosives.

The court had announced that it will deliver judgement on Tuesday at the end of the lengthy trial. Although Sri Lankan courts hand down capital punishment by hanging, it has not been carried out since 1976 with the country maintaining a de facto moratorium on death penalty.

The prosecution described the main accused, Mohamed Naufar, as the ringleader who supported the suicide squad that carried out the coordinated bomb attacks, which also left 500 people wounded.

Mohamed Naufar and two others – Mohamed Anwar Mohamed Riskan and Ahamad Milhan Hayathu Moahmed – who are accused in the Sri Lankan case are also the three suspects charged in the California court in December 2020. They, however, remain in Sri Lankan custody.

Given that the then police chief, Pujith Jayasundara, and then Defence Ministry secretary, Hemasiri Fernando, were sentenced to death by a different Trial-at-Bar for criminal negligence, the accused in the latest case are expected to receive the death penalty if they are found guilty.

Fernando and Jayasundara were accused of failing to prevent the bombings despite Indian intelligence having warned Sri Lankan authorities of an impending attack by a suicide squad led by Zahran Hashim.

The suicide-squad leader claimed allegiance to the Islamic State group in a video shortly before the attack, while local investigators said they had no direct evidence that the group was involved.

The US indictment against the three Sri Lankans alleged that they were Islamic State supporters who called themselves “ISIS in Sri Lanka”.

“The criminal case filed on December 11 2020 in the US District Court in Los Angeles is the result of a nearly two-year investigation by the FBI, which assisted Sri Lankan authorities in the wake of the suicide bombings,” the US Justice Department said at the time.

In February, the Criminal Investigation Department arrested Suresh Sallay, a former head of Sri Lanka’s State Intelligence Service (SIS), on suspicion that he was the actual mastermind behind the country’s worst single terror attack against civilians.

Court records show that Sallay, 58, has been accused of orchestrating the attacks to create instability in the country and clear the way for Gotabaya Rajapaksa to emerge as the law-and-order candidate at the November 2019 presidential election.

Rajapaksa won the presidency and immediately appointed Sallay head of the State Intelligence Service. Sallay is currently being held under the PTA but is undergoing medical treatment at Colombo National Hospital. (COLOMBO/20 September 2026