By Rohana R. Wasala

Concluding part continued from May 21, 2026

The Cardinal’s demand that Shani Abeysekera and Ravi Seneviratna, despite their being under a cloud about the Easter Sunday suicide bombings, be tasked to conduct fresh probes into them in order to track down an alleged mahamolakaru or mastermind, is even more ironical in view of the close relationship that Gotabaya Rajapaksa maintained with the Catholic Church, especially his friendly connection with the Cardinal, from the time he was Secretary of Defence, all of which he describes in his book on pages 93 to 96. He helped the Church in various ways. After the war, he helped with the restoration and reconstruction of the Madhu Church and the Church in Mullikulam, and the renovation of the Kochchikade Church. The Benedict XVI Catholic Institution of Higher Education at Bolawalana, a brainchild of Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, was established in 2015. Gotabaya got the Navy to design and construct the buildings, and the Urban Development Authority, and the Sri Lanka Land Reclamation and Development Corporation (presently called the Sri Lanka Land Development Corporation) to grade the land as it was a flood prone area. But when the construction of the institution was completed, Mahinda Rajapaksa had lost and his government was gone. The Catholic Higher Education institution was opened by the new president Maithripala Sirisena. But the Cardinal invited Gotabaya to the opening ceremony, where he made special mention of the latter as the one who helped complete the project.

The most significant point in Gotabaya’s relationship with the Church was when the Pope (Pope Francis) was invited to visit Sri Lanka. As normal, the papal visit took about two years of preparation. During this period Gotabaya became very close to the Cardinal. When the visit finally took place, the Rajapaksas were out of power. The Cardinal arranged a special audience with the Pope for ex-President Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya at the house of the Papal Nuncio in Colombo. Gotabaya’s personal relationship with the Cardinal remained during the yahapalana years. He and his wife would occasionally be invited to dinner with the Cardinal. 

When Gotabaya made a courtesy call on the Cardinal within the first few days of his assumption of office as President in November 2019, the latter urged him to take legal action against those who were responsible for the Easter Sunday attacks regardless of their status,or their ethnic or religious identity. Asked whether he was satisfied with the composition of the Commission of Inquiry appointed by his predecessor president Maithripala Sirisena or whether he wanted one of his own nominees to be included in the Commission, the Cardinal answered in the negative.

In September 2020, the Cardinal invited president Gotabaya to visit a large coconut estate in the Puttlam District owned by the Colombo Diocese.  The Catholic Church had grown grapes there for producing wine for its own use. The Cardinal took the president for a tour of the vineyard and the winery. They also had a poultry farm on the estate. After serving lunch, president Gotabaya opened a new building for an agro-technical institute built using funds provided by the government of Italy. It was designed for training 50 residential students. They also went to see a village that cultivated up-country vegetables. 

Although president Gotabaya spent the whole day with the Cardinal that day, the latter did not bring up the Easter Sunday investigations matter for discussion. He seemed satisfied with the way the terror attack investigations were being conducted. On a later occasion, the prelate explicitly stated his confidence that the investigating process would deliver justice and his conviction that the Presidential Commission was sincerely looking into the matter.

This was on September 22, 2020. The Cardinal was addressing the media at the end of an event at the All Ceylon Buddhist Congress in Colombo. Gotabaya thinks that the first instance that apparently upset the Cardinal was the Criminal Investigation Department’s release, in early October 2020, of Riyaj Bathiudeen (brother of  MP Rishad Bathiuddeen) who had been arrested, about five months before, on April 14 over alleged links to the Easter Sunday attacks. In a special media briefing held at the Archbishop’s House in Colombo, the Cardinal expressed a suspicion that ‘a political deal’ could be behind the CID’s release of Riyaj Bathiudeen. He highlighted the contradiction between SSP Jaliya Senaratne’s earlier revelation based on investigations into the carnage that this person had maintained direct links with the bombers and his discharge by the CID. 

Responding to this allegation, (the then President) Gotabaya stated in an FB post that the government had not entered into any political deal with parliamentarian Rishad Bathiudeen’s brother Riyaj and that arresting or releasing criminal suspects was not the task of politicians. Gotabaya also adds (in his account on pp. 93-96) that the then State Minister of Security and Home Affairs Chamal Rajapaksa, in reply to a question posed by an opposition MP, stated that Riyaj Bathiudeen had been taken into custody over seven telephone conversations he had with Insaf Ahmed, the bomber who attacked the Cinnamon Grand Hotel in Colombo, but that investigations had not revealed his direct involvement in the suicide bombings.

(Aside: Readers will remember that this is a special case. Insaf Ahmed Ibrahim was the elder of a brother duo of suicide bombers; his younger brother Ilham Ahmed Ibrahim bombed Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo. They were both rich businessmen with a good educational background, sons of a wealthy spice merchant, Yusuf Mohammed Ibrahim. When police raided their house for searching, Ilham’s wife detonated a suicide vest killing herself and her two children. This information is from AI – RRW)

According to Gotabaya, the CID had released Riyaj Bathiudeen without producing him before a Magistrate. As President, Gotabaya writes, he did not have anything to do with suspect Riyaj’s arrest or release. ‘Later, the then Attorney General Dappula de Livera summoned the DIG in charge of the CID and its Chief Investigating Officer over the release of Riyaj Bathiudeen’. As a result of this meeting, the AG noted deficiencies in the investigations against the suspect. Consequently, the CID Director was transferred out with the approval of the National Police Commission.

(So, this is the truth about the then CID chief SSP Shani Abeysekera’s alleged ‘arbitrary’ transfer in November 2020 that the Opposition and NGO human rights activists made such a hue and cry. – RRW)

SJB parliamentarian Kavinda Jayawardane had a meeting with the Cardinal in early December 2020, where the Cardinal expressed the idea that if the government (that is, the minority government set up under Gotabaya soon after he won the election in November 2019) failed to punish those responsible for the Easter Sunday bombings, an alternative course of action would have to be sought. The Cardinal said that though many suspects had been arrested, the investigations were not reliable, and that this case must not be allowed to be swept under the carpet as a result of political machinations or deals.

Gotabaya was invited to participate in the inaugural ceremony of the Benedict XVI Catholic Institution of Higher Education. He was presented with a memento in appreciation of his services towards the establishment of the Catholic Institution of Higher Education. 

Why would the Cardinal get Shani and Ravi to hound Gotabaya? Does the Cardinal still believe the absurd theory that the Easter bombings were caused to create instability in the country so as to bring Gotabaya to power, as claimed by Azad Maulana in the Channel 4 video? To put it differently, does he believe that Gotabaya or a devoted ally was the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday carnage? Is this the Cardinal whom I (RRW) so passionately defended in an article under the title ‘In strong defence of Cardinal: Attacks on Cardinal outrageous and unacceptable’ originally published in The Island on December 9, 2020, and subsequently on the online Lankaweb and Sri Lanka Guardian? I have made frequent laudatory references to the Cardinal since. Of course, the Cardinal is a man of grace and culture. He might have seen the light by now and understood the insanity of going after Gotabaya about the Easter Sunday bombings. 

However, in his short account of the complicated plot that was behind his ouster, Gotabaya mentions the fact that the Cardinal found it difficult to believe that a group of Muslim youth could have carried out the coordinated multiple bombings of such proportions ‘on their own’ (p.140). This was one reason that led him to assume that there was a mastermind behind the Easter Sunday attacks.

Gotabaya writes about the insanity of blaming him for what was confirmed by reputable foreign and domestic intelligence agencies to be an ISIS atrocity. He recalls how, when President Premadasa was assassinated (on the May Day in 1993), a conspiracy theory arose according to which Premadasa himself had planned to bomb his own procession so as to gain public sympathy; he had taken out a white handkerchief to cue the bomber, but something went wrong, and he was killed in the explosion. As for President Premadasa, he was blamed for things that happened while he was in power, says Gotabaya, whereas he himself is being blamed for things that happened when he was not in power. This insanity is not going to bode well for this country. When the then Minister of Justice (Wijedasa Rajapaksa) made his first revelation in Parliament about the spread of Muslim extremism in 2016, many Muslim politicians accused him of being anti-Muslim. Now those same politicians are busily promoting this conspiracy theory that Zaharan and his team had launched suicide attacks to make me President. Some Muslim politicians are trying to promote the view that the suicide bombings had nothing to do with Islam, but everything to do with local politics. The only thing that has not yet been said is that the suicide bombers themselves were not Muslim but Sinhala Buddhists.  

In the wake of the release of the Presidential Commission report, the threat of Islamic extremism has been completely forgotten in the midst of a headlong quest to hold everyone except Muslim extremists responsible for the Easter Sunday attacks. The Cardinal’s pronouncements are creating more divisions in an already divided country. The icing on the cake will be when the Cardinal’s campaign based on wrong assumptions and conjecture against those not responsible for the Easter Sunday bombings results in yet another government that is totally dependent on the Muslim vote like the government of 2015-2019 and is unwilling to do anything to stop the spread of Islamic extremism in the country.” (p.141)

A maulavi speaking (probably at the end of the national memorial service led by Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith at the St Anthony’s Shrine, Kochchikade on April 21, 2026; the video I watched on YouTube didn’t give exact information about the venue) seemed to confirm the truth of Gotabaya’s blunt comments. The maulavi addressed the gathering as a member of the ‘victimised group’ (agathiyatapath parshavaya), by which he meant the Christian and Muslim communities as a single body (How few mainstream Christians and Muslims – free from extremism – are likely to share his view  is a different matter). The implicit oppressor is the Sinhalese Buddhist majority.

The maulavi named some books that he claimed he had read (with obvious scepticism) about the Easter Sunday attacks, including Gotabaya’s book The Conspiracy and Rohan Gunaratna’s Easter Sunday Massacre, and Udaya Gammanpila’s Searching for the Easter Attack Mastermind, and mentioned their prices, implying that the authors wanted only to earn some money by writing about the carnage. He said that the Christians and Catholics were rendered helpless, and the Muslims, even more so.

We (Muslims) were pressed to the wall (as punishment) for reciting the noblest verse (uttareetara gathava) la ilaha illallah – muhammadan rasulullah (There is no god but Allah – Mohammed is His Messenger). Some media supported it (i.e., the anti Muslim attitude). Just as once all Tamils were labelled ‘terrorists’, in the wake of the Easter attacks, we (Muslims) were condemned as religious extremists and terrorists.”

The maulavi blamed the microbiologist who had recommended the cremation of bodies of Covid 19 deceased Muslims against the wishes of their relatives. (But she was acting as per WHO instructions considering local conditions, regarding the disposal of bodies of Covid dead) He begged the President for the list of names of Muslims dead whose bodies were cremated thus against the wishes of relatives for (intended) litigation purposes.

The maulavi further said: The Easter Sunday attack has become a joke. Once they marketed the war (the war against separatism) or did politics exploiting the war.”

We fight for justice. We die for justice”

He hoped justice would be served soon/without delay. 

He concluded his address with the Dhammapada lines (from Verse 21):

”Appamado amata padam – pamado machchuno padam”

(the correct translation is: Heedfulness is the path to the Deathless state – Heedlessness is the path to Death)

The maulavi seemed to have completely missed the profound meaning of the Dhammapada lines. He has accepted the misleading translation of appamado as ‘delay’ instead of the correct ‘heedfulness’ or ‘mindfulness’ or ‘diligence’. Unfortunately, some modern English versions of the Dhammapada found on the internet interpret the Pali term ‘appamado’  of Verse 21 as exclusively meaning ‘delay’, trivialising its deep philosophical import. 

The maulavi’s unwarranted bluster and his macabre ultimatum to the President must have deeply embarrassed the Cardinal and upset the grieving audience in that sacred place. 

In an unconstitutional statement in parliament on May 21, 2026 (last Thursday), ITAK parliamentarian Thurairasa Ravikaran paid a tribute to a dead separatist leader by the name of Balraj. He called him ‘Brigadier’ Balraj, According to Arun Siddharth of the Jaffna Civil Society organisation, who unequivocally condemned Ravikaran’s move as a violation of the oath the MP had taken not to espouse the cause of setting up a separate state within the territory of Sri Lanka, said that Balraj had the blood of over 1000 soldiers of the lawful Sri Lanka’s state army killed in the North in the year 2000. Arun Siddharth pointed out that the title Brigadier Ravikaran arbitrarily conferred on the terrorist was an insult to the officers of that rank in the lawful Sri Lanka state army. He expressed his deepest scorn for all the 225 MPs of the Government and the Opposition for not opposing or calling into question Ravikaran’s seditious act; they should have at least demanded the Speaker for a ruling to expunge the MP’s unlawful tribute to a dead terrorist leader from the Hansard.

The survival of our nation depends on the unconditional peace and unity between Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus to begin with, who are cultural twins.

Concluded