The Catholic Church on Wednesday rejected claims that Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith had requested the appointment of Public Security Ministry Secretary Ravi Seneviratne or Criminal Investigation Department Director Shani Abeysekara to their current positions, Ada Derana reported.
The statement came from Rev. Fr. Cyril Gamini Fernando, Media Spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Colombo, at a Wednesday press briefing in response to questions about remarks made in Parliament by Minister Bimal Rathnayake. Fernando said neither Cardinal Ranjith nor the Catholic Church had ever made any such request for the appointments of the two officials.
Both officials are central to the reopened investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings. Abeysekara was administratively cleared and reinstated as DIG by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in May, and now leads the CID’s renewed Easter probe — a role flagged by former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa as a potential ground for perceived bias in his pending Court of Appeal petition. The denial pushes back against framing that has circulated alongside opposition criticism of those reinstatements.
Asked about Rajapaksa’s petition for an order preventing his arrest, Fernando said it was within the former president’s legal rights and that the public must await the court’s ruling.
He further alleged that false information and defamatory claims were being circulated with the intention of obstructing ongoing investigations into the Easter Sunday attacks and urged the public not to be misled by unverified social media content. The Archdiocese has previously warned that external interference must not derail the probe and has formally maintained that Easter accountability remains a Church priority.
