Sri Lanka’s president will appoint a committee to probe allegations of complicity in 2019 bombings

COLOMBO – Sri Lanka’s president mentioned Sunday he will appoint a committee chaired via a retired Supreme Court pass judgement on to examine allegations made in a British television report that the South Asian nation’s intelligence used to be complicit in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings that killed 269 other folks.

The assaults, which incorporated simultaneous suicide bombings, centered 3 church buildings and 3 vacationer motels. The useless incorporated 42 foreigners from 14 nations.

President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s resolution to appoint a committee headed via a pass judgement on to examine claims that Sri Lankan intelligence had a hand in the bombings that have been performed via Islamic militants got here beneath power from opposition lawmakers, spiritual leaders, activists in addition to the sufferers’ family members. They say that earlier probes failed to expose the reality at the back of the bombings.

The committee’s number one project is to examine the “serious allegations recently brought to light by Channel 4 in a broadcast video,” the president’s administrative center mentioned in a commentary Sunday. It mentioned that the “allegations have added fuel to the fire.”

The commentary mentioned that a former lawyer normal “has made similar claims, suggesting the existence of a mastermind behind the devastating Easter bomb attack.” It mentioned that a parliamentary committee would one at a time examine and “address these concerns comprehensively.”

In a program broadcast Tuesday, Channel 4 interviewed a guy who mentioned had organized a assembly between a native Islamic State-inspired team, National Thowheed Jamath, and a best state intelligence respectable unswerving to former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to formulate a plot to create instability and allow Rajapaksa, a former senior protection respectable, to win the 2019 presidential election.

Rajapaksa used to be pressured to surrender in mid-2022 after mass protests over the rustic’s worst financial disaster.

Rajapaksa on Thursday denied the allegations against him, pronouncing that the declare that “a group of Islamic extremists launched suicide attacks in order to make me president is absurd.”