By Leonard Jayawardena –

The trial of Jesus of Nazareth before Pontius Pilate stands as history’s most profound study in the capitulation of judicial authority to institutional duress. Brought bound before the Roman governor by the Jewish Sanhedrin, Jesus faced a civil ruler who quickly recognized the vacuity of the religious establishment’s charges. John’s Gospel records a private, tense dialogue within the Praetorium where Pilate, frustrated by the prisoner’s calm silence, sought to assert his absolute imperial jurisdiction. “Do you refuse to speak to me?” Pilate demanded, “Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?” Jesus’s response shattered the illusion of the governor’s autonomy and shifted the moral weight of the impending execution back onto its true architects: “You would have no power over me at all unless it were given to you from above. Therefore the one who delivered me to you has the greater sin” (John 19:11).

With these words, Christ drew a sharp line between the weak magistrate who signs an unjust decree out of political expediency, and the religious authorities who manufactured the crisis to preserve their own institutional influence. Pilate washed his hands to absolve himself of the blood of an innocent man, but history remembers his failure to withstand the mob.

The Modern Praetorium and the Weaponized PTA

Two millennia later, a modern variation of this dynamic plays out in the political landscape of Sri Lanka. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake signed the Detention Order of former State Intelligence Service Chief Major General Suresh Sallay under the weaponized Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) on 27 February, 2026 for his alleged involvement in the Easter bombings of 21 April 2019 based on certain statements made to a Channel 4 film by Asad Maulana, a bogus asylum seeker now living in Switzerland with two arrest warrants issued against him by the Sri Lankan state. This in spite of the Imam Report concluding that the allegations made by Maulana are totally unsubstantiated and demonstrably false. [Note 1] Just as Pilate acted to appease a vocal religious hierarchy demanding a sacrificial scapegoat, the modern state apparatus has operated in this case not on concrete evidence, but under the heavy institutional pressure of an influential religious lobby.

Anatomy of a Public Delusion: The Mastermind Myth

The furious collective that filled the courtyard of the Praetorium, baying for a definitive condemnation based on manufactured outrage rather than evidentiary truth, finds its perfect modern incarnation in the vast segment of the Sri Lankan populace captive to the mythology of a political “mastermind” behind the 2019 Easter Sunday tragedy. Despite extensive multi-jurisdictional investigations—ranging from the Presidential Commission of Inquiry to forensic reviews by global agencies like the FBI and Scotland Yard—repeatedly dismantling this narrative and showing Zahran and his extremist, radical group alone to have been responsible for the Easter Sunday massacre, the allure of a grand, coordinated political conspiracy remains deeply entrenched in the public psyche.

Rather than deferring to the verified body of legal and forensic evidence established by global and domestic authorities, this collective operates within self-reinforcing echo chambers driven by acute confirmation bias. Fueled by a deep-seated hatred against the Rajapaksas, who they presume masterminded the Easter Sunday carnage with a view to electoral advantage, the misled public endlessly latch onto random bits of emerging information, eagerly interpreting facts with perfectly sensible explanations as definitive proof of a conspiracy. [Note 2] When examined closely, these fragments provide no such validation, yet they are aggressively weaponized by a populace that value political retribution far above empirical truth. In doing so, they amplify the debunked “mastermind” theory, aggressively flattening a complex geopolitical and ideological radicalization issue into a simplified, emotionally charged narrative of a singular political conspiracy.

Electoral Mathematics and the Failed Anniversary Deadline

For politicians who themselves blindly subscribe to this narrative, the pervasive public delusion acts as an inescapable political mandate. By aligning their personal biases with the calculated mathematics of electoral survival, these leaders convince themselves that sacrificing Major General Suresh Sallay is both morally correct and populistically necessary.

During his 2024 presidential campaign, Anura transformed the hunting of the elusive “mastermind” into an essential plank of his populist platform. He specifically targeted the Catholic Church hierarchy, promising to deliver what they termed “justice”—a concept that had become code for validating their pre-ordained political conclusions. Following his election, Dissanayake repeatedly doubled down on this rhetoric, culminating in an explicit public promise on March 30, 2025, where he vowed that the state would unmask and name the “masterminds” behind the Easter tragedy by the sixth anniversary of the bombings on April 21, 2025. That self-imposed deadline came and went without the promised revelations, highlighting the stark chasm between high-stakes electoral showmanship and actual forensic reality.

Judicial Theater and the Collapse of the Pillayan Narrative

This desperation to salvage a failing political narrative directly birthed a parallel track of judicial theater, most notably seen in the arrest of TMVP leader Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, alias Pillayan, on April 8, 2025. Seeking an immediate headline to satisfy the public appetite before the April 21 anniversary, Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala stood before Parliament on April 10, 2025, and boldly asserted that authorities possessed substantial information linking Pillayan to the Easter Sunday attacks. Months later, on July 9, 2025, Wijepala further misled the House by claiming that ongoing investigations revealed Pillayan had possessed explicit “prior knowledge” of the bombings while held in the Batticaloa prison. However, the deceptive nature of this political script was thoroughly exposed when it later transpired that Pillayan himself had denied being subjected to a single round of questioning regarding the Easter conspiracy during his entire period in custody.

When this state-sponsored theater faced the cold light of judicial scrutiny, the narrative collapsed entirely. By April 2026, after nearly a year of high-profile detention, no Easter Sunday-related charges were filed against Pillayan when he was produced before the Mount Lavinia Magistrate’s Court. It was revealed that the charges actually leveled against him were entirely unrelated to the 2019 tragedy—tracing back instead to a 2006 abduction case. Despite the internet and state media archives proving the Dissanayake administration actively framed the arrest as a breakthrough in the Easter plot to appease the populace, the state’s official legal filings completely omitted the terror charges.

The 25 February Arrest and the Hypocrisy of the PTA

This collapse of the state’s narrative created a dangerous vacuum for the President, who had staked massive political capital on his solemn campaign promise to unmask the “mastermind.” Having already missed his self-imposed deadline of April 21, 2025, and with the subsequent anniversary of the tragedy fast approaching, the administration faced immense, compounding pressure. This coercion emanated primarily from the Catholic hierarchy, which relentlessly demanded an immediate reckoning based on its own pre-ordained political conclusions.

This toxic intersection of aggressive ecclesiastical pressure, public delusion, and political panic directly culminated in the high-profile arrest of Major General Suresh Sallay on 25 February, 2026. Taken into custody under the draconian provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), Sallay’s arrest provided the administration with a temporary shield to appease the Catholic leadership and quiet the restless populace, even as it bypasses the fundamental requirements of standard jurisprudence. There lies a profound, damning irony in this maneuver executed by the President; his party, the National People’s Power (NPP), had previously vehemently opposed the PTA, aggressively campaigning not merely for its amendment, but for its total abolition. This hypocrisy is uniquely heightened by the fact that the arbitrary detention of an intelligence chief without indictable forensic proof represents perhaps the worst abuse of the Act since its very inception.

The Evidentiary Vacuum of the June 10 Narrative

The desperate architecture of this modern-day tribunal became glaringly obvious on June 10, when Public Security Minister Wijepala—whose credibility had already been dismantled by his previous falsehoods regarding Pillayan—stood before the public to unveil a new narrative. He claimed that “reasonable and justifiable grounds” had finally been uncovered to prove Sallay had tactically orchestrated the Easter Sunday suicide bombers. To bolster this claim, Wijepala unleashed a string of fabrications, resurrecting the sensationalized allegations made by Asad Maulana in the infamous Channel 4 documentary—claims that had already been thoroughly investigated, exposed as fraudulent, and completely debunked in the authoritative Imam Report. Yet, this aggressive rhetoric immediately collapses under the weight of its own institutional inertia. If the Dissanayake administration truly possesses such definitive, unassailable evidence, the question must be asked: why have they refused to bring formal charges against Sallay in an open court of law? Why bypass the normal, transparent course of constitutional justice in favor of a closed-door executive detention? The state’s absolute failure to initiate a legitimate prosecution is deeply revealing. In the theater of political persecution, actions—or rather, this calculated lack of judicial action—speak infinitely louder than words, exposing a regime that possesses plenty of theatrical script for the public mob, but not a shred of verifiable truth for a judge.

Ecclesiastical Endorsement and the Price of Political Debt

In that same June 10 speech, Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala admitted that these investigations into the alleged political conspiracy under this Government were initiated following a formal complaint lodged by the Executive Director of the Centre for Society & Religion on 1 October 2024. Far from an impartial, evidence-led operation by the state, this revelation carries the unmistakable implication that the current probe was born not out of independent police intelligence, but out of political compliance. It confirms that the entire apparatus of hunting for a political “mastermind” is a process fully engineered, sustained, and directed by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.

This deep-seated clerical influence over the state’s apparatus was directly enabled by the political realities of the preceding elections. During the campaign, Colombo Archbishop Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith, while carefully avoiding naming specific candidates, explicitly called upon the electorate to remove the existing ruling political class and replace them with a “new class of leadership.” This heavily coded backing lent immense moral authority to Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the National People’s Power (NPP), serving as a vital regional catalyst for their campaign. Within the traditional Catholic strongholds, the vote was driven by a public expectation—deeply cultivated by the Church hierarchy—that an NPP government would finally bypass all previous investigative findings to unmask the fictional “mastermind.” Backed by this influential ecclesiastical endorsement to secure a vital electoral flank, the newly elected administration found itself deeply indebted to the Church.

The Catholic Church’s role as the definitive driving force behind this pursuit of a fictional political ‘mastermind’ is further exposed by its intense pressure on the newly elected National People’s Power (NPP) government to reinstate the original 2019 investigative team. By aggressively demanding the return of the exact personnel who initially handled the Easter massacre files, the Church’s lobbying effectively mandated the appointment of retired Senior Deputy Inspector General (SDIG) Ravi Seneviratne as Secretary to the Ministry of Public Security and retired Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Shani Abeysekera as the Director of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID).

This institutional manipulation was laid bare on the floor of Parliament when NPP Leader of the House Bimal Rathnayake plainly admitted that this specific duo was appointed to their official positions at the behest of the Church. In the wake of this damning political disclosure, the Colombo Archdiocese immediately retreated into defensive semantics. Through its media spokesperson, the Church issued a public denial, claiming they had never requested these two individuals by name, but had merely demanded that the “original team” from the 2019 investigations be reinstated to root out the alleged conspiracy! This linguistic evasion remains a distinction without a difference; since the individuals in question were the undisputed heads and faces of that original unit, demanding the team’s reinstatement was, in practical terms, a direct instruction to restore them to power.

The Alwis Report and the Partisan Shielding of Investigators

This institutional capture is highly problematic and unprecedented. The Jayaki de Alwis Committee of Inquiry, which was mandated to evaluate systemic failures in Sri Lanka’s security apparatus regarding the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, recommended that both Shani and Ravi be prosecuted for negligence and dereliction of duty. In a staggering conflict of interest, the NPP administration immediately halted the official state inquiries into these two men upon ascending to power.

It is preposterous for Abeysekera—a man who was under active investigation–to be re-installed as head of the CID to pilot the conspiracy investigation. This calculated trajectory began before the election when both men retired, joined the NPP, and campaigned on its stages. This overt partisan alignment is widely suspected to have been a proactive insurance policy, deliberately designed to secure high-level political protection, paralyze active state inquiries into their own operational negligence, and insulate themselves entirely from criminal prosecution.

Furthermore, Abeysekera’s full-time affiliation and active political engagement with the NPP completely dismantle the professional neutrality required for an independent investigative post. It is highly unprecedented for an individual who actively worked to install a specific regime into power to then be handed the keys to the state’s premier investigative body. This overt party alignment directly compromises any illusion of objectivity, casting his current official position as a tool for targeted political retribution rather than impartial justice.

Circumventing the Law: Sanitizing a Proven Hoax

The state’s evidentiary vacuum was laid bare by a team of high-profile lawyers appearing for Major General Suresh Sallay pro bono publico. Speaking at a press conference, Attorney-at-Law Sanjeewa Weerawickrama revealed that the CID had left Sallay un-interrogated for eleven days post-arrest and had not even initially listed him as a formal suspect. [Note 3] This total lack of a legal foundation was first exposed during a farcical police press briefing immediately following the detention. When pressed repeatedly by journalists to disclose the basis for the arrest, officials failed to produce a single shred of proof, absurdly admitting that Sallay had been arrested and detained so that evidence could be uncovered through interrogation—a profound travesty of standard jurisprudence, where a person is legally supposed to be arrested only when credible evidence already exists. [Note 4]

At an initial court hearing, the CID attempted to present a preliminary body of “evidence,” which Sallay’s legal team immediately dismantled and debunked. At a subsequent hearing, rather than producing new, verified material, the prosecution simply repeated those same discredited preliminary claims, while introducing the debunked Channel 4 statements of Asad Maulana as further evidence to bolster their failing narrative.

However, this cinematic storyline immediately faced judicial resistance when the prosecution introduced Maulana’s allegations only verbally; when pointedly questioned by the presiding judge, the CID was forced to admit they had not recorded any direct statement from Maulana himself. The judge promptly directed the CID to record an official statement from the witness and produce it in court.

Faced with this clear judicial order, the CID had to manufacture a solution to a logistical and political crisis. Because Maulana was living in Switzerland, proper international legal protocols strictly dictated a formal government-to-government request to record his testimony. To circumvent this rigorous, transparent procedure and protect Maulana—a bogus asylum seeker whose precarious legal status would be severely jeopardized by formal, state-level scrutiny because of his past associations with various LTTE factions and Zahran’s extremist group—CID Director Shani Abeysekera arranged for him to travel across the border to France. There, his statement was quietly recorded at the Sri Lankan embassy in Paris. According to Weerawickrama, this freshly minted testimony was practically identical to the Channel 4 script, with one telling modification: the glaring factual errors that the Imam Report had used to expose the documentary as a fiction were conveniently and meticulously altered. In a desperate bid to salvage a political trial, Abeysekera had bypassed international legal norms to sanitize a proven hoax for the modern Sanhedrin.

The Custodial Crisis and the Fast Unto Death

As I write this, Suresh Sallay remains hospitalized under tight security at the Colombo National Hospital, his physical condition rapidly deteriorating following a grueling “fast unto death” initiated on June 6. Admitted to the Emergency Treatment Unit (ETU) on June 7 after collapsing in his cell, he has adamantly refused food, water, and vital medical treatment. His legal team revealed that the hunger strike was triggered by a series of degrading custodial abuses designed to systematically humiliate the decorated officer—including a malicious incident where his meals were intentionally served on a soiled newspaper, causing his food to fall onto the prison floor. Furthermore, the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) launched a formal investigation into allegations of severe torture lodged by Sallay’s wife, Manori Sallay. Following an unannounced inspection of the CID facility, the Commission officially reprimanded the authorities, documenting inhumane, dark, and unventilated holding conditions that Sallay himself described to his attorneys as a literal “hell.”

According to Sanjeewa Weerawickrama, a member of Sallay’s legal team, Sallay lives simply on his pension, and, at the time of his arbitrary arrest, was merely on his way to work at a private organization. His mother, a Catholic, and his wife, a Sinhalese, have made fervent, heartbreaking appeals to the public regarding his plight. Sallay comes from a proud lineage that has served the nation’s armed forces for two generations before him; he himself has carved out a distinguished career as an intelligence chief, rendering invaluable, life-risking service in crushing LTTE terrorism. It is utterly unconscionable for a society to stand by in silence and watch a decorated officer be methodically destroyed by an ideologically blinded, electorally driven state apparatus.

The Architecture of the Greater Sin

Ultimately, this modern-day crucifixion reveals that the machinery of state oppression does not move in a vacuum. Two millennia after Pontius Pilate washed his hands of an innocent man to placate an angry crowd, the echo of the Praetorium rings with terrifying clarity across Sri Lanka. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake will face the harsh judgment of history for signing the unjust decrees of political expediency, but he remains merely the ideologically blinded magistrate validating institutional duress. The true moral authorship of this tragedy lies with those who engineered the crisis. When Christ declared to his captor, “Therefore the one who delivered me to you has the greater sin,” he laid the ultimate guilt at the feet of the institutional architects who demanded a sacrificial scapegoat.

In the contemporary landscape of Sri Lanka, we must radically expand the scope of that indictment. The “They” who have delivered Suresh Sallay to Anura encompasses, first and foremost, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church. This ecclesiastical leadership has steadfastly refused to accept the clear, evidence-based conclusions of extensive local and global investigations, all of which repeatedly confirmed that the tragedy was the work of localized, self-radicalized Islamist extremists operating with zero political complicity. Instead, the Church hierarchy obstinately clings to its belief in a non-existent political mastermind. In doing so, they have weaponized their significant electoral leverage to influence critical state security appointments and engineer legal traps designed purely to keep their grand theory alive. For them, Major General Suresh Sallay is not even the final target; he is merely a high-profile casualty caught in the gears of an institutional obsession—a convenient, tactical sacrifice yielded by the government to retain the backing of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

Yet, this indictment does not stop with the modern high priests. The “They” who bear the ultimate moral guilt also includes every single citizen who, blinded by partisan hatred and driven by acute confirmation bias, willfully subscribes to this false conspiracy theory. It encompasses the vast digital mob that roams through echo chambers, eagerly consuming fabricated narratives while remaining aggressively ignorant of verified forensic evidence. By acting as the baying crowd in the courtyard of the Praetorium to demand a fictional “mastermind,” this misled public has successfully forced the hand of an unprincipled state, rendering Major General Suresh Sallay a mere scapegoat to satisfy a pre-ordained political fiction. To the church leaders who piloted this legal persecution, and to the biased populace that fueled the outrage—it is you who have rendered an innocent man a casualty of political theater. And it is you who bear the greater sin.

Notes

1. For more details, please see my CT article titled The Imam Report Has Debunked The Sole Direct Alleged Evidence For The Easter Bombings Conspiracy Theory, in which a link to the Report is also given.

2. An example of this sort is “Sonic, Sonic,” who actually turned out to be an undercover SIS intelligence operative who had infiltrated Zahran’s group.

3. The statement to the media by Attorney-at-Law Sanjeewa Weerawickrama here

4. The police press briefing held immediately after Sallay’s arrest here