The Man Who Was Defence Minister: Why Maithripala Sirisena Must Stand Trial for the Easter Sunday Massacre

The High Court has sent the IGP and the Defence Secretary to the gallows for failing to prevent the bombings. Their superior — the Minister of Defence who happened also to be the President — has paid some money and walked away. That is not justice. That is a travesty.

By Sisira Kumara Siriwardene – LLB (SL), LLM (Wales), LLM (York, Canada) / Attorney-at-Law & Barrister & Solicitor (Sri Lanka / Ontario, Canada)

I have practised law long enough to know that the most dangerous criminals are not always the ones who pull the trigger. Sometimes the most dangerous man in the room is the one who knew what was coming, who had the power to stop it, and who chose — deliberately, systematically — to do nothing. That is the case I wish to make against former President Maithripala Sirisena in respect of the Easter Sunday massacre of 21 April 2019.

Let me be blunt from the outset. On that Easter Sunday, 279 people were murdered in cold blood. Forty-five of them were foreigners. Over five hundred were maimed and wounded. Three churches and three hotels were turned into slaughterhouses. And the man who was, at the material time, the Minister of Defence of this country — the man whose single most constitutional duty was to protect the lives of those people — has never been charged with a single criminal offence. Not one.

That same man was, of course, also the President of the Republic. And for years, that dual identity has served as his shield. The President cannot be prosecuted, we were told. Article 35 of the Constitution. Presidential immunity. End of story.

It is not the end of the story. And I intend to show why.

What has changed — what has made this article necessary at this moment — is the judgment of the Permanent Trial-at-Bar delivered on 31 July 2026. A three-judge bench of the High Court, by a majority of two to one, sentenced former Inspector General of Police Pujith Jayasundara and former Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando to death. Their crime? Failing to prevent the Easter Sunday attacks. Not planting the bombs. Not conspiring with the bombers. Failing to prevent them. Failing to act on intelligence that was staring them in the face. The court called it criminal negligence. The court called it an omission. And the court said that omission was serious enough to warrant the death penalty.

I put it to you, the reader, in the plainest terms I can: if the IGP and the Defence Secretary deserve to hang for their omissions, what does the Minister of Defence deserve?

Because here is the thing that everyone in this country seems to have conveniently forgotten. Pujith Jayasundara answered to Hemasiri Fernando. Hemasiri Fernando answered to the Minister of Defence. And the Minister of Defence was Maithripala Sirisena. The chain of command ran upwards, not downwards. The two men who have been sentenced to death were subordinates. The superior walks free. There is something deeply, profoundly wrong with that picture.

I.  What Did the Minister of Defence Do — or Rather, What Did He Not Do?

I do not propose to deal in speculation. I deal in facts, because that is what lawyers do. And the facts of this case, many of them now matters of judicial record, are these:

  • The intelligence was there. It was not vague. It was not rumour. Indian intelligence transmitted a specific warning on 4 April 2019 — seventeen full days before the bombings — naming the would-be suicide bombers and identifying the targets: churches and hotels. The Director of the State Intelligence Service, Senior DIG Nilantha Jayawardena, received these warnings and, as the evidence now shows, transmitted them upwards. The Minister of Defence knew, or at the very least ought to have known, that an attack was imminent. He did nothing with that knowledge.
  • He left the country. On the very eve of the attack, Sirisena flew to Singapore. I want the reader to pause and think about what that means. The Minister of Defence — the man constitutionally responsible for the security of the nation — departed the jurisdiction at the exact moment his own intelligence services were screaming that a terrorist attack was about to happen. And he did not appoint an Acting Minister of Defence before he left. There was no one — no one — legally empowered to make security decisions in his absence. The seat was empty. The chair was vacant. And the bombs went off.
  • He did not come back. This is the part that I find most difficult to fathom, even after years of studying this case. The bombs detonated on the morning of 21 April. The death toll climbed by the hour. The entire nation was in shock. And the Minister of Defence, holidaying in Singapore, did not get on the next available flight home. Commercial flights were operating. He could have returned within hours. He chose not to. He stayed abroad for days while his country bled.
  • He kept the Prime Minister out of the Security Council. This is not my allegation — it is a matter of record. Sirisena personally ordered that the then Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, be excluded from National Security Council meetings. The head of government — the man who, under our Constitution, bears collective responsibility for the security of the State — was deliberately, systematically denied access to the intelligence that might have prevented the carnage. Why? Because of a political feud. Because Sirisena and Wickremesinghe had fallen out. Personal animosity was placed above national security. The result was 279 corpses.
  • He kept the IGP out of the Security Council too. The Inspector General of Police — the chief law enforcement officer of the Republic, the man whose job it was to act on threat intelligence and deploy protective resources — was also shut out. He was not in the room when the warnings were discussed. He was not given the intelligence he needed to do his job. And now that same IGP, Pujith Jayasundara, has been sentenced to death for failing to act on warnings he was not even permitted to hear. If that is not a grotesque injustice, I do not know what is.

I have listed five failures. Any one of them, standing alone, would be a serious lapse. Taken together — and they must be taken together, because they are not isolated incidents but a pattern — they amount to something far worse than negligence. They amount to a systematic dismantling of every mechanism that could have prevented the attack. The intelligence was received and ignored. The Security Council was gutted. The Prime Minister was sidelined. The police chief was sidelined. The Minister of Defence left the country and left no one in charge. And then 279 people died.

I ask the reader: is that just negligence? Or is it something else entirely?

II.  The Coup of October 2018 and the Shadow of Suresh Sallay

To understand what happened on Easter Sunday 2019, you have to understand what happened in October 2018. I say this because the two events are not unconnected, and anyone who examines the timeline honestly will see it.

On 26 October 2018, President Sirisena did something that was, by any honest reading, unconstitutional: he dismissed the lawfully elected Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and swore in Mahinda Rajapaksa in his place. The courts ultimately struck it down. It was a coup — a failed one, but a coup, nonetheless. And the reverberations of that failure did not simply vanish when the courts restored the status quo.

What followed was a government at war with itself. The President and the Prime Minister were barely on speaking terms. The security apparatus became a battleground of factional loyalty. And into these vacuum stepped figures whose role in the Easter Sunday attack is now, finally, the subject of criminal prosecution.

On 25 February 2026 — only months ago — the former Director of State Intelligence, Major General Suresh Sallay, was arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The charge? Conspiracy and aiding and abetting the Easter Sunday bombings. Let that sink in. The man who was Director of State Intelligence — the man who was supposed to be gathering the intelligence to prevent the attack — has been arrested for conspiring in it. Investigators say he aided and abetted the very atrocity his office existed to prevent.

Now connect the dots. The failed coup of October 2018. The systematic exclusion of the Prime Minister and the IGP from the Security Council. The reliance on an intelligence chief now charged with conspiracy. The departure from the country without an acting minister. The ignored warnings. I am not saying these are coincidences. I am saying they are a pattern. And when a Minister of Defence who has been warned of an imminent attack proceeds to dismantle every single mechanism that could prevent it — sidelining the PM, sidelining the police chief, leaving the country, trusting an intelligence officer now charged with conspiring in the attack — the word “negligence” is no longer adequate. The word that suggests itself is “facilitation.” Facilitation by omission.

I know that is a serious word. I use it deliberately.

III.  The Immunity Defence — and Why It Does Not Work

I anticipate the objection. I have heard it a hundred times. “You cannot prosecute a President. Article 35. The Constitution says so.” Let us examine that proposition, because it is not nearly as impenetrable as people assume.

Article 35 of the 1978 Constitution provides that while a person holds office as President, no civil or criminal proceedings shall be instituted or continued against him in any court. That much is clear. But two things need to be said about it, and the second is the one that matters.

First: Sirisena is no longer President. He left office in November 2019. Whatever immunity Article 35 conferred upon him during his tenure, it does not shield a former president from prosecution for criminal acts committed while in office — at least not for acts that fall outside the scope of the immunity. The shield is tied to the office. The office is gone.

Second — and this is the crucial legal point — the immunity in Article 35 attaches to acts done by the President in his capacity as President. It does not, and cannot, extend to acts done in a separate and distinct ministerial capacity. And this is where the Supreme Court’s decision in Mallikarachchi v. Shiva Pasupati, Attorney General becomes decisive.

Mallikarachchi v. Shiva Pasupati, Attorney General (1985) 1 Sri Lanka Law Reports 74 is the leading authority on presidential immunity under the 1978 Constitution. Chief Justice Sharvananda, writing for the court, explained the rationale of Article 35: the head of state must be insulated from the harassment of litigation in order to discharge the functions of that high office without constant distraction. That is the policy. That is the purpose. The immunity exists to protect the office of the President, not to grant a personal licence for criminality in every capacity the holder of that office might also occupy.

Now apply that to the facts. Maithripala Sirisena held two positions simultaneously. He was President. And he was Minister of Defence. These are not the same thing. The presidency is one office; the defence portfolio is another. When he failed to convene the Security Council, when he excluded the Prime Minister and the IGP, when he left the country without appointing an acting minister, when he ignored intelligence of an imminent attack — these were not acts of presidential statecraft. They were failures in the discharge of his duties as Minister of Defence. They were ministerial omissions.

The immunity that attaches to the presidential office does not — and on the reasoning of Mallikarachchi, cannot — extend to shield a person from liability for acts and omissions committed in a separate ministerial capacity. The man who was President may have been immune while in office. The man who was Minister of Defence was not. And the man who was Minister of Defence is the man I want in the dock.

IV.  The Supreme Court Has Already Decided the Facts

I want to be very clear about something. This is not a case where I am asking the courts to venture into uncharted territory. The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka has already adjudicated Sirisena’s responsibility for the Easter Sunday attack. The facts have been found. The findings have been made. All that remains is the criminal prosecution that those findings demand.

On 12 January 2023, a seven-judge bench of the Supreme Court — seven judges — delivered judgment in fundamental rights applications filed under Article 126 of the Constitution. The petitioners were the families of the victims, the Catholic clergy, and the Bar Association of Sri Lanka. The court found Sirisena and four other senior officials responsible for failing to prevent the attacks. It ordered Sirisena to pay Rs. 100 million from his personal funds. The other officials were ordered to pay Rs. 210 million between them.

Read what the court said. These are not my words. These are the words of the highest court in the land:

“All this is a stark reality that strikes this court as a serious omission on the part of the then-president.”

“This dismal failure on the part of former President Sirisena resulted in disastrous consequences for this country. Not only were lives lost and properties destroyed, but interracial tension and interethnic hatred began to raise their ugly heads, causing the very fabric of this nation to be broken.”

“The due care with which the minister of defence should have exercised his wide powers in the greater good of the country was totally non-existent according to the evidence that has been placed before this court.”

I want the reader to look at that last sentence again. Look at it carefully. The court did not say “the president.” The court said, “the minister of defence.” The Supreme Court itself framed Sirisena’s failure as a failure of his ministerial duty — not his presidential duty, his ministerial duty. The very distinction I have been arguing for, the very distinction that pierces the Article 35 shield, is the distinction the Supreme Court itself drew in its own judgment.

So here is where we stand. The Supreme Court has found, on the evidence, that Sirisena’s ministerial omissions caused the failure to prevent the attack. The High Court, in the Jayasundara and Fernando trial, has established that such omissions are criminal — criminally serious enough to warrant the death penalty. The legal and factual foundations for a prosecution are already in place. What is missing is the indictment.

V.  The Case I Filed in 2018 — and What Might Have Been

I want to now say something about my own involvement in this matter, because it is relevant and because the public has a right to know. In 2018, before the Easter Sunday attack, before the bombs, before any of this — I filed a writ application in the Court of Appeal of Sri Lanka. The application sought an order that the then President, Maithripala Sirisena, be produced before a panel of consultant psychiatric specialists for the purpose of verifying his mental capacity to govern the country. The matter was reported in the media at the time. It was discussed under the heading of Maithripala Sirisena’s mental condition.

The application was dismissed. But I want to be precise about how it was dismissed, because the how matters. The Attorney General raised preliminary objections — technical, procedural objections — and the Court of Appeal upheld those objections and dismissed the application without ever reaching the substantive question. The court never examined whether the President was mentally fit to hold office. The court never ordered a psychiatric assessment. The court never heard evidence on the merits. It threw the case out on a technicality.

I maintained then, and I maintain now, that the dismissal was on procedural grounds, not substantive ones. The court did not hold that the President was mentally fit. The court held that it could not entertain the application.

I raise this now not to relitigate that matter — the procedural point has been decided, and I accept that. I raise it because of what it means for what followed. If the Court of Appeal had looked past the procedural objections and examined the substance — if a panel of psychiatrists had assessed the President and if the court had found him unfit — the constitutional mechanism for the removal of a president who cannot discharge the functions of his office would have been engaged as a president can be impeached on the ground of mental incapacity. . He would have been removed. And a president removed in 2018 for want of mental capacity would not have been the Minister of Defence on Easter Sunday 2019.

Think about that. If that application had been heard on its merits, the intelligence warnings of April 2019 would have been received by a different minister — a competent minister, a minister who was not in the grip of whatever condition I believed required assessment. The Security Council would have been convened. The Prime Minister would have been in the room. The IGP would have been in the room. The acting minister would have been in the country. And 279 people who died on Easter Sunday might — I submit probably would — be alive today.

VI.  “He Didn’t Do Anything” — That Is Precisely the Offence

I know what the response will be. I have heard it already. “You want to prosecute a man for doing nothing? For inaction? Since when is doing nothing a crime?”

Since always, is the answer. Or rather, since the moment the Penal Code of this country recognised — as it always has, following the Indian Penal Code tradition upon which it is modelled — that an offence can be committed by omission as well as by commission. This is not a novel legal theory I have invented. It is basic criminal law.

Where the law imposes a duty to act — and I cannot think of a duty more fundamental, more elemental, than the duty of a Minister of Defence to protect the lives of citizens when he knows, or ought to know, that a terrorist attack is imminent — a deliberate failure to discharge that duty is itself an offence. The crime is not in what was done. The crime is in what was not done, when the law demanded that something be done.

And let us not pretend this is an abstract legal proposition with no practical application. The Permanent Trial-at-Bar that sat in judgment on Pujith Jayasundara and Hemasiri Fernando did exactly this. It convicted them not for bombing the churches. It convicted them for failing to prevent the bombings. For their omissions. And it sentenced them to death. The court has already demonstrated, in the most emphatic way possible, that omission in the face of a known and imminent threat is a capital offence under Sri Lankan law.

So, I say again: if the omissions of subordinates — the IGP, the Defence Secretary — are serious enough to warrant the death penalty, the omissions of the minister who was their superior, who had greater power, greater responsibility, and greater knowledge, cannot possibly be treated as something lesser. The logic is inescapable. Unless, of course, we are saying that the law applies differently to presidents than it does to policemen. And if that is what we are saying, then we should have the honesty to say it out loud and stop pretending that we believe in the rule of law.

VII.  The Indictment That Must Follow

Let me bring this to a close. I am a lawyer. I believe in the law. I believe that the law, properly applied, is the greatest instrument of justice available to a civilised society. But I also believe — and I say this with the conviction of a man who has spent years working on this issue — that the law is failing the victims of the Easter Sunday attack.

Two men have been sentenced to death for failing to prevent the massacre. Both were subordinates. Both answered to the Minister of Defence. The Minister of Defence, who was also the President, has been found by the Supreme Court to bear responsibility for the same failure. He has been ordered to pay compensation. And he has been left to walk free.

That is not accountability. That is a down payment. And it is not enough.

The legal pathway is clear. Article 35 immunity does not extend to acts and omissions committed in a ministerial capacity — that is the principle established in Mallikarachchi v. Attorney General. The Supreme Court has already found, on the evidence, that Sirisena’s omissions as Minister of Defence caused the failure to prevent the attack. The Penal Code recognises omissions as offences where there is a duty to act. And the High Court has now shown, in the Jayasundara and Fernando judgment, that failing to prevent the Easter Sunday attack by omission is a capital offence.

Every brick is in place. The foundation is laid. What is needed is the will to build on it.

I therefore call upon the Attorney General to indict former President Maithripala Sirisena before the High Court of Sri Lanka — and I would urge, given the gravity and the public importance of the matter, that it be before a Permanent Trial-at-Bar of the same character as that which tried Jayasundara and Fernando. The indictment should capture the full scope of his criminal omissions as Minister of Defence: the receipt and disregard of intelligence warnings; the deliberate dismantling of the Security Council apparatus; the exclusion of the Prime Minister and the IGP; the abandonment of his post without appointing an acting minister; and the broader pattern of conduct that, by omission, facilitated the single deadliest terrorist attack this country has seen since the war.

I am not naive. I know what I am asking. I know the political and institutional forces that will resist this. I know that there will be those who say it cannot be done, that it is unprecedented, that it is too much. But I have spent my career in the law, and I have learned this much: if the law is worth anything, it must apply to the powerful as it applies to the weak. If the IGP can hang for his omissions, the Minister of Defence must at the very least stand trial for his. If a policeman’s failure to act is a capital offence, a president’s failure to act cannot be a matter for compensation alone.

There are 279 people who died on Easter Sunday 2019 who are entitled to that answer. There are over 500 who were wounded who are entitled to it. There are families who have spent seven years waiting for justice who are entitled to it. And there is a nation — a nation whose social fabric was torn apart that morning, a nation that was told to move on, to accept, to forget — that is entitled to it.

Accountability that stops at the bottom of the chain of command is not accountability. It is scapegoating. And Sri Lanka deserves better than scapegoats. Sri Lanka deserves the truth, and the truth is this: the man who was Defence Minister on Easter Sunday 2019 — the man who was warned, who did nothing, who left the country, who dismantled the security apparatus, who trusted an intelligence chief now charged with conspiracy — that man must stand trial. Not because I say so. Because the law demands it. And because 279 dead demand it.

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