One of the 15 men convicted over the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks told the Colombo High Court that the people truly responsible remain free, and offered to give evidence if the court would let him.
The statement came from the sixth accused, Mohamed Anwar Mohamed Riskan alias Abu Thariq, in a plea for leniency after the three-judge Trial-at-Bar convicted him. He was sentenced to 200 years’ rigorous imprisonment, NewsFirst reported.
Riskan gave no evidence and made no dock statement at any point in the trial, and was not represented by counsel. The mitigation plea was the first time he addressed the bench.
What he told the court
“My family has done nothing wrong to the victims… Something happened and we became caught up in it. There is no smoke without fire. The people who should be held responsible for this are still outside enjoying their freedom.”
He said he was “willing to give evidence regarding this incident. That means ensuring justice,” and asked why he and his family had been placed in that position “for something we did not do.” He added that the people who did commit the crime “must definitely be punished.”
He also told the bench his wife has cancer, his mother is 75 and his sister has just sat her Ordinary Level examinations, but said he was “completely at peace.”
He made a similar statement earlier in the sitting, telling the judges that those acquitted “left crying” while the convicted were “smiling” — reported at the time by Hiru News.
Why the court convicted him
Presiding judge Navaratne Marasinghe said the indictment charged offences under the Prevention of Terrorism Act — conspiracy, aiding and abetting, promoting extremist ideology and creating discord between communities — and that the bench had weighed evidence on extremist sermons, weapons-training workshops and safe houses maintained before the attacks.
On the conspiracy charge he observed that participants need not be in the same place:
“There is no requirement that those involved in a conspiracy must be standing in a line at different places… Those who became involved at the beginning, those who became involved in the middle, as well as those who became involved at the end, can all be parties to the conspiracy.”
Hiru News, summarising the judgment’s principal findings, reported that the sixth defendant was among eleven found to have stayed in safe houses with the bombers, and that he was taken to Panadura, Katuwapitiya and Sainthamaruthu on 21 April 2019 — which the court treated as showing the security discipline maintained inside the group. Explosives were stored at Sainthamaruthu and precursor chemicals at Panadura and Katuwapitiya; urea, nitric acid and metal balls were recovered from those locations after the bombings.
Hiru’s account of the dock statements the court rejected does not list the sixth defendant, consistent with NewsFirst’s report that he never made one.
The court rejected the explanations offered by the first to fifth accused, finding they appeared to have been framed after the accused had weighed the seriousness of the charges against them.
The scale of the case
The trial opened before the Permanent Trial-at-Bar on 10 October 2023 and closed on 24 August 2026. The prosecution brought 23,270 charges against 24 accused, called 2,309 witnesses and produced 2,076 exhibits. The bench admitted ten confessions made to police under the PTA after finding them voluntary.
Fifteen were convicted and nine acquitted; the sentences and the confiscation order followed the same night.
NewsFirst rendered the sixth accused as Rizkan on 22 September and Riskan on 23 September, and Hiru uses Riskan — transliteration variants, not different people.
