Sri Lanka Ex-Security Chiefs to Appeal Easter Bombings Verdict
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- Hemasiri Fernando and Pujith Jayasundara were sentenced to death on July 31 by a three-judge Colombo High Court bench in a 2-1 decision for failing to prevent the April 21, 2019 Easter bombings that killed 279 people and wounded more than 500.
- Defense lawyer Chaminda Athukorale said the pair would file an appeal in Sri Lanka's Supreme Court within two weeks, pointing to the dissenting judge's finding that the two men had 'no motive to kill and no links with the actual perpetrators.'
- The court was told that India's intelligence agency warned Sri Lanka on April 4, 2019 of a possible suicide attack by Islamist extremists targeting churches, but authorities failed to act on the tip.
- The two men had previously been acquitted by a different High Court in February 2022 on grounds of insufficient evidence, before the state appealed and the Supreme Court ordered the retrial that produced the death sentences.
- Sri Lanka has an unofficial moratorium on executions since 1976, with 817 people on death row and sentences routinely commuted to life imprisonment, making the punishment largely symbolic.
- Fernando, 76, and Jayasundara, 66 are being held in a maximum-security prison in Colombo and were earlier ordered to pay 125 million rupees (S$477,000) in civil damages to survivors of the attacks.
Why it matters: The appeal keeps alive legal scrutiny of senior officials' culpability in the worst terrorist attack on Sri Lankan soil in decades, yet the 1976 execution moratorium means Fernando and Jayasundara are virtually certain never to be hanged — the 817 others on death row face the same commutation pattern.
