The Colombo Permanent High Court Trial-at-Bar sentenced former Inspector General of Police Pujith Jayasundara to death on Friday (31), finding him criminally responsible for failing to act on intelligence warnings ahead of the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings.

The ruling came by a majority of the three-judge bench. Presiding judge Priyantha Liyanage and Judge Thilakarathna Bandara found Jayasundara guilty, while Judge Viraj Weerasuriya dissented, holding that the prosecution had failed to prove the charges beyond reasonable doubt and acquitting him. NewsFirst reported that the former police chief was convicted on 854 of the 855 charges filed against him.

Announcing the majority decision, Liyanage said the failure to act on intelligence about impending suicide bombings had resulted in 268 deaths and 586 injuries, at a time when the accused served as the country’s police chief and was responsible for public security, according to Hiru News.

Outlets described the counts differently. Hiru News reported convictions for neglect of official duties and abetting murder, and NewsFirst for aiding and abetting deaths through dereliction of official duties, while Ada Derana said the court found him guilty of criminal dereliction of duty, attempted murder and murder.

Hiru News reported that then State Intelligence Service Director Nilantha Jayawardena passed on intelligence on April 20, 2019 — the day before the attacks — warning of suicide attacks targeting Catholic churches and tourist hotels in and around Colombo, and that the accused took no preventive action.

The verdict against former Defence Secretary Hemasiri Fernando was not delivered alongside this one, but followed later the same day. The same bench sentenced Fernando to death, also convicting him on 854 of 855 charges by a majority, with Weerasuriya again dissenting. Both rulings had been listed for July 31.

Context

Friday’s judgment follows a retrial ordered by the Supreme Court. On February 18, 2022, an earlier Trial-at-Bar bench acquitted both Jayasundara and Fernando without calling for their defence, once the prosecution closed its evidence. The Attorney General appealed, and the Supreme Court held that the bench had erred in law by acquitting the accused without first calling on them to present a defence, and ordered the cases retried, the Daily Mirror reported.

The coordinated suicide bombings of April 21, 2019 struck churches and hotels in Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa. The conviction is the first time a senior official has been held criminally liable for the security failures surrounding the attacks.

Fernando had earlier testified that then-President Maithripala Sirisena had prior knowledge of the threat. The wider conspiracy investigation remains open, with the Attorney General having named former intelligence chief Suresh Salley as the “mastermind and contractor”; Salley’s petition against his detention under the PTA is due to be taken up on August 25.

Update (July 31, evening): Jayasundara and Fernando were taken to prison on Friday evening, hours after the sentences were handed down, the Daily Mirror and Hiru News reported. Both outlets said the transfer followed the Trial-at-Bar’s majority findings of dereliction of duty and aiding and abetting murder over the failure to act on prior intelligence warnings.

Update (August 1): Both men will appeal against their convictions, their lawyer said on Saturday. Counsel Chaminda Athukorale told AFP that an appeal would be filed in the Supreme Court within two weeks, and pointed to the dissenting judgment as the basis: it “explains why the two accused had no motive to kill and no links with the actual perpetrators of the bombings.”

Jayasundara, 66, and Fernando, 76, are being held in a maximum-security prison in Colombo. Sri Lanka has carried out no judicial execution since 1976, and death sentences are in practice commuted to life imprisonment; government figures given to Parliament in February put the number of people on death row at 817.

Sources