The Court of Appeal on Thursday dismissed a writ application by former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa that sought to prevent his arrest over the investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday attacks — and dismissed it without taking the matter up for hearing.
The application had asked the court to bar the Criminal Investigation Department from arresting and detaining Rajapaksa under the Prevention of Terrorism Act in connection with the Easter Sunday probe, Hiru News reported. The order was made after the bench considered the facts set out in the application itself.
The ruling came from a two-judge bench of Court of Appeal President Justice Rohantha Abeysuriya and Justice Sarath Dissanayake, according to the Daily Mirror.
What the petition was for
A writ application of this kind is pre-emptive: it asks a court to restrain an investigating agency from exercising a power it has not yet used. Rajapaksa was not under arrest, and the effect of the petition, had it succeeded, would have been to place the CID under a judicial bar before any arrest was attempted.
Dismissing it without a hearing is the more consequential half of Thursday’s order. The court did not weigh competing arguments and rule against him on the merits; it declined to take the application up at all. The restraint he sought was therefore never in place, and nothing in the order creates an obstacle to the CID proceeding.
Neither outlet reported the reasoning behind the refusal, and neither indicated whether an arrest is contemplated.
How the case reached this point
The application has been before the Court of Appeal since mid-year. Rajapaksa appeared at the court in July in the same arrest-prevention matter, at a stage when SLPP MP Namal Rajapaksa — his nephew — appeared in support in his capacity as an attorney-at-law. The Daily Mirror’s own archive records the petition being fixed for order in early August; the order was delivered on Thursday.
Rajapaksa, who left office in July 2022 during the economic crisis after the Aragalaya protests, appeared separately before court on 29 September in the Lalith–Kugan case, an unrelated matter.
A note on one widely circulated figure
A claim circulating alongside Thursday’s ruling — that 15 people have been convicted over the Easter Sunday attacks and sentenced to terms of 200 to 260 years — does not appear in either outlet’s report of this order. LankaNewz has not been able to verify it against the reporting on this ruling and has therefore left it out.
Sourcing. Two verified newsrooms carried the order. Hiru alone reported that the dismissal was without a hearing and that the application named the CID and the Prevention of Terrorism Act specifically; the Daily Mirror report is a two-sentence brief. No other verified outlet had filed on the ruling at the time of writing.
