AG’s Dept. in the dock

Thursday 17th December 2020

The Attorney General’s Department gives the witnesses who appear before the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI), probing the Easter Sunday terror attacks, a really hard time by throwing them curveballs and eliciting information which they would otherwise not divulge. Now, it has been left with egg on its face; it stands accused of a serious lapse, which stood the National Thowheed Jamaath (NTJ) and its leader Zahran Hashim in good stead.

The PCoI has been informed that the AG’s Department sat on a file submitted by the police on the NTJ leader, in June 2017, and remembered its existence only two months after the Easter Sunday attacks in 2019. This, however, is no revelation. The fact that the AG’s Department did not act on that file came to light some moons ago. But other issues eclipsed it.

The errant AG’s Department officials who did not take action on the aforesaid file are in trouble. They have sought to lay the blame for their inaction at the door of the police. They would have us believe that if the police had furnished information about two arrest warrants on Zahran, they would have conducted a speedy investigation. This argument is seriously flawed in that if they had initiated an investigation and interviewed the police officers concerned, they would have been informed of the arrest warrants at issue. If Zahran had been arrested and interrogated on his extremist activities, perhaps the Easter Sunday carnage could have been prevented. The AG’s Department now finds itself in the company of those whose lapses made the Easter Sunday attacks possible.

This is not the first time the AG’s Department is assisting a PCoI in probing a criminal matter, having shelved a file thereon and allowed disaster to happen. In 2017, it helped a PCoI investigate the Treasury bond scams having sat on a file the CID submitted to it on the perpetrators of that financial crime.

We have pointed out, in a number of previous comments, that following the first bond scam, in 2015, the CID submitted a file (No: C/187/161/2015) to the AG’s Department on that financial crime, seeking its advice on how to proceed. A senior department official, who received the file, recommended criminal action. Strangely, criminal action against the bond scammers was terminated and civil action recommended instead. The file was mysteriously turned into a confidential document (CF/08/2015) and made to disappear. The bond racketeers named in the file were thus let off the hook, and in 2016 they committed the second bond scam, which was much bigger than the first one. We have written extensively on this missing file but to no avail. The blame for the second bond scam should be apportioned to the AG’s Department as well although its counsel did commendably well in exposing the scammers before the PCoI.

The police cannot justify their failure to arrest Zahran, in 2017, by blaming others. They should have been able to arrest him because he was reportedly sighted in the Eastern Province after the issuance of the arrest warrants on him. They should not have waited for court orders or the AG’s directives to take action against Zahran and his associates responsible for several violent clashes in the East. They even swoop on lovers in parks and on beaches, don’t they? The manner in which they acted in handling violent extremists in the Eastern Province was suggestive of political interference in their investigations. But, they could have stopped Zahran if they had acted on repeated intelligence warnings of the Easter Sunday terror strikes. The CID was busy doing political work and baulked at arresting troublemakers connected to the yahapalana government.

All government leaders, defence bigwigs, the police, state intelligence agencies and AG’s Department were in a slumber during the yahapalana regime; only Zahran was awake. The Easter Sunday attacks came as no surprise. If Prabhakaran had been alive, he would have achieved his goal hands down.