On Easter Sunday 2019, six suicide bombings hit Catholic churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka, killing 269 people. Quickly, the perpetrators were identified as domestic religious extremists the NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath), claimed by Islamic State as their own. The wider world, pausing to note that the perceived threat of Islamic fundamentalism helped the controversial Rajapaksa family regain the Sri Lankan presidency a few months after the bombings, chalked it up as yet another terrorist atrocity about which nothing much could be said or done and moved on.
Sri Lanka’s Easter Bombings, a new Dispatches investigation, makes serious new allegations about the attacks, based on whistleblower testimony. While the accusations are startling, they are straightforward: the charge is that allies of the Rajapaksas had associations with the NTJ, and that they made it hard for law enforcement to arrest its leaders prior to the bombings or to fully investigate the massacre afterwards.
