Sri Lanka’s High Court on Tuesday concluded a five-year trial by sentencing 15 men to 220 years in prison each for their roles in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, one of the deadliest attacks in the country’s history.
A three-judge panel of the Colombo Permanent High Court Trial-at-Bar, comprising judges Navaratne Marasinghe, Ramanathan Kannan and Sujeewa Nissanka, convicted 14 of the 24 original defendants on all charges, including murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and unlawful possession of firearms and explosives under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. A fifteenth defendant was convicted on some but not all charges. All 15 received identical 220-year sentences. Nine others were acquitted and released.
Among those sentenced was Mohamed Ibrahim Mohamed Naufer, described by prosecutors as the operation’s mastermind, whose alleged ties to Zaharan Hashim, leader of the local militant group National Thowheeth Jama’ath, were a focus of the proceedings. Hashim was among the suicide bombers who died carrying out the attack.
The April 21, 2019, bombings killed 279 people and injured hundreds more when nine suicide bombers targeted three churches, two Catholic and one Protestant, along with three hotels in coordinated strikes during Easter observances. Eight British nationals were among 42 foreign victims killed. Sri Lankan authorities attributed the attacks to National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a domestic Islamist group with declared links to Islamic State.
The court ordered the confiscation of the convicted men’s property and other assets. Those acquitted were seen embracing convicted co-defendants before being separated, while the convicted were given the opportunity to argue for more lenient sentencing ahead of the ruling.
Sri Lanka’s Roman Catholic Church welcomed the verdicts. “Finally, we have justice,” priest Jude Fernando told reporters, adding that reaching this point had taken considerable time.
Tuesday’s verdict marks the first criminal convictions obtained directly over the bombings themselves. In July, a separate court sentenced former police chief Pujith Jayasundara and former Defence Ministry secretary Hemasiri Fernando to death after finding them guilty of criminal negligence for failing to act on intelligence warnings that could have prevented the attack. Sri Lanka has not carried out an execution since 1976, despite retaining the death penalty in law.
