If Zaharan had been arrested BEFORE Easter Sunday massacre – Would Gotabaya have still become President?

 

The 2019 Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka were not unforeseen. Intelligence agencies had repeatedly flagged threats, warrants existed against Zaharan. Yet negligence, inaction, and bureaucratic delays allowed an ideology rooted in hatred to manifest in mass murder.

 

Over the years, a conspiracy theory has circulated suggesting that Zaharan was “used” by state intelligence to facilitate terror attacks that would enable Gotabaya Rajapakse to become President in November 2019. This claim implies political orchestration behind the massacre.

 

Reality check:

1. Let us first presume officials in office were not part of any such conspiracy, the question becomes: why did they fail to act on warnings & fulfilling their mandated duties to arrest Zaharan & his associates to prevent attacks?
2. Let us presume they had fulfilled their duties — by arresting Zaharan and other operatives before the attacks — would the 2019 Presidential election outcome have changed?

The answer is clear: Gotabaya Rajapakse would have become President regardless. Any contestant would have won. The Easter Sunday attacks did not create his election path; commission/intel report findings and judicial records confirm that negligence resulted in the attacks not orchestration of the attacks.

 

By the time of the Easter Sunday attacks, the public confidence in the Yahapalana administration was eroding. The visible breakdown in coordination between the President and Prime Minister, policy incoherence, economic pressures, and public frustration over corruptions had already weakened the administration’s credibility.

The 2018 local government election had already demonstrated a major public rejection of the ruling coalition, showing that the political momentum had shifted long before April 2019.

 

In that context, the Easter attacks reconfirmed the visible collapse in governance and national security mismanagement.

This is why the theory that the attacks alone “brought Gotabaya to power” is analytically weak.

 

Mandates vs Failures: Who Was Supposed to Act?

 

State Intelligence Service (SIS)

• Mandate:Monitor extremist groups, analyze threats, advise NSC.
• Noteworthy: they do not possess investigative powers.
• Duty:Identify Zahran and NTJ/JMI threat, escalate to NSC & police, ensure preventive measures.
• Failure:Threats were not escalated effectively;

 

Criminal Investigation Department (CID)

• Mandate:Investigate suspicious activities and gather evidence.
• Duty:Execute warrants, recommend arrests.
• Failure:Investigated preliminarily but did not act decisively;

 

Terrorism Investigation Division (TID / Police)

• Mandate:Track extremist threats and advise local police.
• Duty:Arrest suspects, secure vulnerable targets.
• Failure:Warnings were ignored; preventive action on Easter was minimal, yet file seeking legal advice/action on Zaharan was given to AG’s dept in 2018.

 

National Security Council (NSC)

• Mandate:Oversight and coordination of intelligence and law enforcement.
• Duty:Take immediate preventive measures; direct arrests and security measures.
• Failure:Did not convene actionable sessions on Zahran or NTJ; bureaucratic delays contributed to inaction. Aware of a likely threat & attack but did not take threat seriously.

 

Attorney General (AG) Department

• Mandate:Provide legal guidance and prosecution advice.
• Duty:Authorize preventive action or emergency warrants.
• Failure:Delays in responding to TID/SIS submissions contributed to failure to prevent attacks.

 

Supreme Court Confirmation:

““The attacks could have been prevented if proactive and timely responses had been taken.” — SC FR Determination, Jan 2023

Omissions of the respondents effectively betray the people and public trust by recklessly failing to accord due priority to intelligence information.”

 

Timeline of Negligence

• 2015 onwards:Intelligence flagged radicalization; early extremist acts even on Muslim communities were ignored.
• 2016:Justice Minister Wijayadasa Rajapakse warned Parliament about 32 individuals from 4 wealthy Muslim families joining ISIS; warnings ignored. Muslim MPs claimed statement as ‘hate speech’.
• November 2016:At a National Security Council meeting, the State Intelligence Service reported that more than 20 extremist groups from different ethnic communities were already operating in Sri Lanka, specifically identifying extremist Muslim groups including Thowheed Jamaath and referring to departures of families linked to ISIS. This establishes that the state was aware of the extremist ecosystem years before Easter 2019 and long before the presidential election narrative later emerged. https://dbsjeyaraj.com/dbsj/?p=49922
• 2019 post-attack security sweeps also uncovered caches of swords and other weapons in several locations, including some mosque premises and homes. The attempts by political figures to downplay some of these discoveries only reinforced the larger pattern of minimising visible warning signs instead of confronting the broader extremist infrastructure.
• The above demolishes the theory that Zaharan’s network emerged to influence the 2019 election, because the extremist ecosystem was already officially identified nearly three years earlier.

 

• 2017–2018:Despite this institutional awareness, radicalisation, hate preaching, vandalism, and operational cells linked to Zaharan continued without decisive disruption.
• Early 2018:Warrants existed for Zaharan; enforcement delayed by bureaucratic inaction. File sent to AGs dept.
• April 21, 2019:Nine suicide bombers carried out coordinated attacks.
• Post-Attack:Supreme Court FR (Jan 2023) confirmed negligence and breach of duty.

 

Had Zaharan been arrested, the attacks might have been prevented.

Yet his extremist ideology would have persisted— he would continue preaching and organizing until another opportunity arose or someone else would have taken over, unless his network and financiers were also neutralized alongside any other similar networks that was capable of radicalizing youth to kill.

 

Negligence allowed both immediate destruction. However, the potential for future violence continues so long as the ideology of hate and massacre for martyrdom remains without its chains being dislodged and the promoters and financiers apprehended while permanently closing all avenues that enables such hate to be preached.

 

Faith Leaders on What Could Have Been — Church Perspectives and Shifts

 

The later shift in public discourse from documented negligence toward speculative media-driven narratives is itself part of why the core title question matters.

 

The Presidential Commission had already heard 440 witnesses across 88 volumes, giving all stakeholders—including Church representatives—a substantial evidentiary record of negligence and intelligence failure.

 

Once the discussion moves away from that foundation toward later allegations, the central counterfactual becomes even more important: if Zaharan had been arrested when warnings first emerged, neither the massacre nor the later politicisation of the tragedy would likely have occurred.

 

Facts vs Conspiracy: Where Justice Lies

• NTJ & JMI were extremist groups known to authorities.
• Members of these groups believed in and endorsed extremism & pledged to carry out acts of violence.
• Official SIS briefings had already identified over 20 extremist groups by November 2016, including Thowheed-linked networks and ISIS-linked departures. This predates Gotabaya Rajapakse’s candidacy by several years and fundamentally weakens the theory that the extremist network emerged for electoral purposes.

 

Electoral Reality: Catholic Vote was split

• The electoral data from Catholic-influenced polling divisions further weakens the theory that the Easter attacks were politically designed to create a uniform vote shift in favour of Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

 

• Negombo→ Sajith 44,032 | Gotabaya 31,743
• Mannar→ Sajith 53,101 | Gotabaya 6,569
• Wattala→ Sajith 49,463 | Gotabaya 48,214
• Katana→ Sajith 43,053 | Gotabaya 71,565
• Ja-Ela→ Sajith 41,649 | Gotabaya 71,690
• Chilaw→ Sajith 47,159 | Gotabaya 43,903

 

This voting spread across Catholic-influenced polling divisions demonstrates that the most directly affected faith communities did not respond as a single electoral bloc.

 

Therefore, the claim that the Easter attacks were politically designed to engineer one uniform church-vote outcome is contradicted by the actual electoral spread.

 

If the most directly affected Catholic-influenced areas themselves did not vote as a single bloc, the claim that the attacks were designed to manufacture a predictable Catholic electoral swing becomes analytically weak.

 

• Intelligence warnings about Zahran were repeatedly issued – from the time of former Justice Ministers address in Parliament, statutory bodies tasked to prevent crime and their heads should have devised plans to deal with the issue.
• Nine suicide bombers carried out the attacks; victims’ lives were lost. That more suicide bombers were lined up is made clear when the daughter-in-law committed suicide inside the house in Dematagoda while the sister of the Mawavella Buddha statue vandalism culprits admitted that 15 women had pledged to sacrifice their lives for the cause. Who are these women & where are they now?
• Supreme Court ordered compensation and confirmed negligence by state officials.

 

Conspiracy Theories

• Foreign governments orchestrating the attacks.
• Families funding bombers.
• Politicians aiding attackers.
• Media or NGOs complicit in cover-ups.
• Attack to bring Gotabaya Rajapakse to power

 

“Do you want justice — or do you want conspiracy?

 

Justice follows facts: intelligence, judicial findings, and accountability.

Conspiracy fosters endless speculation and distracts from the victims and disallows closure for the victim families.

Those chasing conspiracies are not seeking justice — they are protecting negligence, diverting people from realizing the facts & accepting the truth.

 

Negligence allowed a massacre to occur — but what is worse is that diverting the issue from the root cause & promoting conspiracy theories is actually allowing a dangerous extremist ecosystem to survive, adapt, and remain capable of future violence.

 

That is why justice lies in confronting the documented failures, dismantling the ideological and financial networks behind radicalisation, identifying the invisible operatives and silent promoters and refusing to let speculation replace accountability.

 

Therefore, the evidence suggests that arresting Zaharan before Easter would most likely have saved lives, but it would not have fundamentally altered the pre-existing political trajectory that led to the 2019 presidential outcome.

 

But if the underlying ideology and institutional failures remain unaddressed, the possibility of future Zaharans cannot be ruled out – many of those accused have been released mainly because authorities have failed to identify the root cause needed to take action against them – making the released, walking dangers while inaction against those who are strategically diverting the issue are no less dangerous.

 

The most important vacuum in this entire debate is rarely confronted.

The present wave of conspiracy theories exists only because Zaharan succeeded in carrying out the massacre. But if he had been arrested when the first warnings emerged, if the bombers had been disrupted, and if Easter Sunday 2019 had passed without bloodshed, what narrative would the conspiracy voices be advancing today?

 

What political theory would they build if the crime itself had never taken place?

This question is left with the reader, because it exposes how much of the present speculation depends not on evidence, but on the tragedy having been allowed to occur through negligence.

 

The more serious national security concern is not merely the existence of conspiracy theories, but the range of actors who benefit from keeping public attention away from the documented failures and neutralizing the still-dangerous extremist ecosystem.

 

Different narratives can serve different interests:

• diaspora political actors with longstanding revenge,
• NGOs focused on weakening military and intelligence apparatus, political elements seeking present-day advantage from retrospective blame,
• and extremist networks that benefit when authorities are diverted from identifying silent operatives, radicalisation channels, funding streams, and dormant cells.
• In this sense, those who amplify speculative rhetoric for political or institutional gain may unintentionally serve the same outcome as extremist networks themselves — keeping the state’s focus away from dismantling the root structures that made Easter Sunday possible.

 

That is why narrative diversion is not merely a political problem, but a continuing national security risk.

 

 

 

 

Shenali D Waduge