Whose hand was it?

Thursday 28th January, 2021

The Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI), probing the Easter Sunday carnage, has reportedly wound up its sittings. The last witness to testify before it was former CID Director Shanie Abeysekera. He neither rejected nor confirmed the claim made by others that there was an invisible hand behind the Easter Sunday carnage (2019). His statement on the issue smacked of gobbledygook. Several key witnesses who gave evidence before him, however, clearly stated that there had been a hidden hand behind the terror strikes. Among them are former President Maithripala Sirisena, SLMC leader and SJB MP Rauff Hakeem and former CID SDIG Ravi Seneviratne.

It does not require deductive or inductive or abductive reasoning as such, or special investigative skills to arrive at the conclusion that there was an invisible hand behind the National Thowheed Jamaat (NTJ) and its ‘leader’, Zahran. It has now been established that the NTJ planned a second wave of terror, stockpiled arms and explosives and trained a large number of cadres. It would not have made such preparations painstakingly for a few rounds of attack. If Zahran had been the real mastermind of the terror strikes, he would not have chosen to die in the first wave of terror, leaving his outfit rudderless. He led the Easter attacks from the front, boosting the morale of his suicide cadres possibly because he was confident that someone else he had reposed his trust in would ensure the continuation of the NTJ’s terror project. Thankfully, no sooner had the Easter Sunday bombings occurred than the military cracked down on the NTJ, and the swiftness of the counterterror operations apparently preempted the second wave. However, not all trained NTJ cadres have been captured. The possibility of the terrorist rump launching attacks cannot be ruled out. The success of operations to neutralise NTJ terror once and for all hinges on the country’s ability to identify Zahran’s handler.

It is doubtful whether the people are waiting for the PCoI report to know whose lapses helped the NTJ carry out the Easter Sunday attacks with ease. This, they are already aware of, as can be seen from the results of the last presidential and parliamentary elections. The yahapalana leaders and their lackeys in uniform emasculated the state intelligence agencies and ignored repeated warnings of terror attacks. The blame for security lapses that enabled the NTJ to strike at will should be apportioned to the then President Sirisena as well; he would have faced the same fate as UNP Ranil Wickremesinghe at the last general election if he had not closed ranks with the SLPP. People usually do not base their judgments on the findings and/or recommendations of presidential commissions of inquiry or even rulings in court cases for that matter. The PCoI, which probed the Treasury bond scams, did not even name some culprits, but the people have relegated them to the political dustbin.

It is too early to say whether the PCoI, which probed the Easter Sunday carnage, dug deep enough to ascertain who actually masterminded the NTJ attacks. We have to wait until its report is submitted to the President. Many are the questions that have gone unanswered. We hope the PCoI report will provide answers thereto: why did the NTJ use two bombers for the suicide attacks at Shangri-La, Colombo? One of them was Zahran himself. He could have got the other bomber to take some other target. Why didn’t he do so? Did his handler seek to send any message to the world through the Shangri-La attack? If so, what was it? Was Zahran duped into communicating with and taking orders from a fake ISIS created by a powerful spy agency? Is there any truth in the media reports that the police were denied access to a luxury hotel room, where explosive detection canines led them to, following the Easter Sunday bombings?