Easter, 2019
Former head of the Sri Lankan State Intelligence Service (SIS), Major-General (Ret’d) Suresh Sallay is detained in Sri Lanka under the PTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act).
Sallay is under investigation for his possible role in the bombings that horrified the world on Easter Sunday 2019. Many innocent people were killed on that day, including children, foreign tourists and Christian worshippers.
The allegation is that Sallay facilitated the mayhem in order to get Gotabaya Rajapaksa (Gota) elected as president of Sri Lanka. Sallay was not the head of any intelligence agency at the time of the Easter 2019 attack. After the bombings, in December 2019, the newly elected president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, appointed Sallay as the head of the SIS. Sallay was a Brigadier in the SLA (Sri Lanka Army) at the time of the bombings. Gota promoted him to Major-General.
Allegations made in a 2023 Channel 4 Dispatches documentary suggested Sallay had met prior to the bombing with members of NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) the extremist group responsible for the Easter Bombings. The alleged aim was to create chaos in Sri Lanka so that Gota could restore order.
On 21 April 2019, a series of coordinated suicide bombings targeted three churches and three luxury hotels across Sri Lanka, killing 279 and injuring 500. The air force said an improvised explosive device - a 6ft-long plastic pipe packed with explosives - had been found near the Bandaranaike International Airport.
Sallay joined the army in 1987. From 2006 to 2009, he was First Secretary at the Sri Lankan Embassy in Paris. Military officials have given him the credit for intelligence operations that targeted Tamil Tiger positions in the final phase of the civil war which ended in May 2009.
Sallay was officially in Paris when Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge was brutally killed but his role in that crime is being scrutinised. Investigations by the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) linked members of the Tripoli Platoon, a unit of Sri Lanka’s Directorate of Military Intelligence, to the 8 January 2009 killing. The platoon operated under the command of then-Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Allegations suggest the unit was used for extrajudicial operations against journalists critical of the government.
At the time of Lasantha’s killing, Sallay was classed as a Military Intelligence Officer (on diplomatic secondment). While his official role was diplomatic, he remained an active military intelligence officer during this period.
Responding to the Channel 4 programme in 2023, Gota said that to claim that a group of Islamic extremists launched suicide attacks in order to make him President, is absurd.
I will go into a great deal of further detail about the Easter bombings in future articles.
Watch this space.