Sri Lanka court sentences former officials to death over Easter Sunday bombings

A Sri Lankan court has sentenced former police chief Pujith Jayasundara and former defence ministry secretary Hemasiri Fernando to death over the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings. The ruling was delivered by a three-judge court in a majority decision on Friday. It concerns the failure of senior officials to prevent attacks that killed more than 260 people and injured more than 500.

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The court found that the two men failed in their duties to stop the bombings, which targeted three churches and three luxury tourist hotels. The attacks were carried out by Islamic State-inspired militants, according to the court record cited in the case. Among those killed were two Australians, Manik Suriaaratchi and her 10-year-old daughter Alexendria, who died when a bomb exploded inside a church in Negombo, north of Colombo.

The court heard that an Indian intelligence agency had warned Sri Lanka weeks earlier about a possible suicide attack by Islamist extremists. Despite that warning, authorities did not take action, according to the ruling. Jayasundara, 66, and Fernando, 76, can appeal to the Supreme Court.

They have been remanded in custody until bail is granted, although Sri Lanka has not carried out the death penalty since 1976. The decision is significant because the Easter Sunday bombings remain one of the deadliest attacks in Sri Lanka's recent history. The case has also drawn international attention because of the deaths of foreign nationals and the scale of the security failure alleged by prosecutors.

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The ruling adds a new legal stage to a long-running effort to assign responsibility for the attacks and the official response before them. The two former officials were arrested in 2019 and held in custody for four months before later being released on bail. They were acquitted of the same charges by a three-judge High Court bench in 2022.

In a separate civil case, they were ordered to pay 125 million rupees in damages to survivors of the attack, showing that the legal consequences have continued beyond the criminal trial. What remains unclear is how the Supreme Court will handle any appeal and whether the death sentences will stand in practice. It is also not yet clear whether the ruling will lead to further legal or political scrutiny of the wider security failures around the bombings.

For now, the case remains a central part of Sri Lanka's reckoning with the 2019 attacks and the warnings that preceded them.

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