The Attorney General has written to the Chief Justice requesting that a three-judge High Court bench be constituted to hear the case over the alleged attack on the “Gota Go Gama” protest site at Galle Face.
Indictments are expected to be filed against 20 defendants, among them former Inspector General of Police Deshabandu Tennakoon and former minister Johnston Fernando, NewsFirst reported on Tuesday.
The Attorney General’s Department said the indictments will be filed under 328 charges. It added that indictments will also be served for causing grievous harm to 56 individuals during the alleged attack.
Why a three-judge bench matters
A request for a bench of three High Court judges signals that the Attorney General intends the matter to be heard as a Trial-at-Bar — a format reserved for cases treated as especially grave or complex, heard without a jury and, in practice, on a continuous basis. The Chief Justice decides whether to constitute such a bench.
Gota Go Gama was the encampment at Galle Face that became the centre of the 2022 aragalaya protest movement against the Rajapaksa administration. The site was attacked on 9 May 2022, and the violence that followed spread across the country and led to thousands of arrests. Accountability for the attack itself has moved slowly through the courts in the years since, with successive rounds of travel bans, arrest warrants and preliminary proceedings but no trial.
The number of charges and the separate count of 56 people alleged to have suffered grievous harm indicate the scale of the indictment now being prepared. No date has been announced for the indictments to be served, and the Chief Justice has not publicly responded to the Attorney General’s request.
