Retired Major General Suresh Salley, the former State Intelligence Chief held under a detention order over the Easter Sunday attacks, was produced before the Colombo Judicial Medical Officer on Wednesday under Special Task Force security, NewsFirst reported.
The Criminal Investigation Department (CID) presented Salley to the JMO following a court order issued at the Fort Magistrate’s Court on a request from his attorneys.
In simultaneous developments before the same magistrate, the CID has formally stated that Pulasthini, also known as Sarah Jasmine — the wife of the Katuwapitiya suicide bomber Mohamed Hasthun — did not die in the Sainthamaruthu blast on April 21, 2019. The CID told court that she fled to India and that evidence of her travel route has been obtained.
The disclosure rewrites a key plank of the official Easter narrative. Two earlier DNA tests, dated September 19, 2019 and March 3, 2021, both concluded that Sarah Jasmine had not been identified among the remains. A third test using samples obtained on April 27, 2022 was claimed to have confirmed her death — and is the report the CID is now treating as suspect.
Investigators told the magistrate that the third test was ordered after Salley, then State Intelligence Chief under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, repeatedly pressed the case in National Security Council meetings — a forum from which the CID is normally excluded. Former IGP C.D. Wickramaratne and a former Deputy IGP both testified that Salley insisted Sarah Jasmine had died at the scene and demanded fresh sampling, despite CID and JMO advice that further testing was unwarranted.
A former CID inspector described how a black polythene bag containing bone fragments was found beside grave 16 at Sainthamaruthu and labelled grave 17 — the source of the 2022 sample. A Government Analyst confirmed the bones matched a daughter of Sarah Jasmine’s mother, after which all material was consumed in extraction. The JMO present at the second exhumation said the fragment marked 17-D appeared to be a lower vertebra not seen during the original recovery.
The CID also told court that the report was personally collected from the Government Analyst’s Department by the IGP, with Salley present, and pushed to the Police Media Spokesman immediately — conduct it described as obstruction of an investigation that had been proceeding on the assumption Sarah Jasmine was alive.
The hearings continue at the Fort Magistrate’s Court, where Salley remains in custody on a CID progress report due May 20. The Attorney General’s Department has previously identified him in court as a key driving force in the Easter attacks.
