The Court of Appeal on Thursday rejected every application to intervene in the writ petition brought by former State Intelligence Service chief Major General (Retd.) Suresh Sallay against his arrest and detention, NewsFirst reported at 10.16 a.m.
The order was delivered by a bench of Court of Appeal President Justice Rohantha Abeysuriya and Justice Priyantha Fernando, who had reserved it after hearing the applications on 14 October. Hiru News carried the same ruling at 10.28 a.m.
Who was shut out
The applicants were not a single bloc, and that matters. NewsFirst lists them as several Buddhist clergy, including Venerable Bengamuwe Nalaka Thera; His Eminence Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, the Archbishop of Colombo; and a number of civil society organisations.
Those parties were not on the same side of the argument. The Cardinal filed in July seeking the dismissal of Sallay’s petition — he was opposing Sallay. Other clergy filed in support of him. The Court of Appeal has now refused all of them permission to be heard, rather than preferring one camp over another.
By 25 August there were 12 intervening petitions before the court. This ruling disposes of that entire body of applications.
What this does not decide
The order concerns standing, not the merits. It means the intervenors cannot file submissions or lead evidence in the writ case; it says nothing about whether Sallay’s detention was lawful.
That question is still listed. The same two judges concluded oral submissions in September and fixed 27 November for their decision on whether to grant leave to proceed, along with the applications for interim relief. Parties were directed to file written submissions by 20 October.
A separate matter — the criminal case against Sallay before the Colombo Fort Magistrate — was adjourned on Wednesday to 25 November. The two November dates belong to different courts and different proceedings and should not be read as one.
Sallay is being held and questioned over the investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, which killed more than 260 people.
Not reported
Neither filing gives the court’s reasoning for refusing the interventions, nor states whether the applicants may seek to challenge the order. Neither says whether the ruling covered all 12 petitions recorded in August or a smaller set, and neither carries a response from the Archbishop’s office or from the civil society organisations involved.
Ada Derana also filed on this ruling (adaderana.lk/news/250367), but the site has been returning a CloudFront block to this desk for more than a month, so its report could not be fetched or independently dated and is not cited here.
