While investigating Suresh Sallay, the former spy chief, police found that Chula Kodituwakku, the director of military intelligence at the time of the attacks, was warned about Mohamed Zahran before the Easter Bombings took place.
Many officers, from both intelligence services and the police, have been implicated in the Easter bombing investigations. Six weeks ago, the Colombo High Court sentenced the former IGP and former defence ministry secretary to death for failing to prevent the attacks despite early warnings.
Judicial proceedings and Sri Lankan inquiry commissions related to the Easter Bombings have thus far focused on the information provided by Indian central government spy agencies to the State Intelligence Service via official channels.
However, Tamil Nadu’s intelligence service — the Q Branch — also passed intelligence on an imminent attack by Mohamed Zahran’s group to Sri Lankan military intelligence six months before the bombing, a police update to court says.
The update, called a B report, was presented to the Fort Magistrate’s Court on September 2nd. It details how in 2018 the Q Branch, communicating informally via informants, shared information linking Zahran’s group with the killing of two policemen at Vavunathivu, a few months before the Easter attacks.
Rishad Bathiudeen, a former minister, is also named in the investigations for helping Zahran illegally travel to India. He denies the claims, saying he’s never met Zahran. Zahran was the leader of the National Thowheed Jamath, or NTJ, the group that carried out the Easter Sunday Bombings. Kodituwakku, the then military intelligence director speaking to The Examiner, denied receiving warnings. Neither have been questioned by the CID so far, they said.
Zahran’s 2018 killings
On November 30th, 2018 two police officers were killed by NTJ in Vavunathivu, Batticaloa. The attack is an important incident in the ongoing investigations.
B reports submitted to court earlier this year describe how some officers from the State Intelligence Service and military intelligence conspired to shift the blame on the murders to a former LTTE cadre. They also spread the idea that the LTTE was regrouping. The reports suggest this cover-up allowed Zahran’s National Thowheed Jamath to organise without detection until they carried out the 2019 bombings.
So far, the CID has taken statements from over a hundred people in connection with Sallay’s case. The latest B report finds that not only intelligence officers, but the director of military intelligence himself was informed of at least some of Zahran’s activities. The report relies on two witness statements by a corporal in the army’s 1st military intelligence corps and a former LTTE member who was his informant since 2016.
The corporal recruited the ex-LTTE informant after his return from India in 2016. The report says that when in India, the informant was closely connected to an “Eswaramoorthy”, identified as the then head of the Q Branch. It was C. Eswaramoorthy who warned India’s central government’s intelligence agencies about the Easter bombings well in advance, the Indian press reported.
Through this informant, Eswaramoorthy was introduced to the corporal, with whom he cultivated a relationship over the phone from 2018 onwards. Eswaramoorthy even spoke on occasion directly to the corporal’s commanding officer. Through these connections, Eswaramoorthy shared information with Sri Lanka’s military intelligence.
Prior to the Vavunathivu killings, Eswaramoorthy told the corporal and the informant that a moulavi named Zahran was spreading extremist ideologies through YouTube. The corporal then compiled a report on Zahran including the YouTube videos, an ISIS training manual, and a suicide bomb-making “catalog” that had been shared through WhatsApp. According to the corporal, this report was forwarded to the director of military intelligence.
The informant called the corporal the morning after the attack, and told him that Eswaramoorthy had informed him that NTJ was behind the killings. He had been warning about Zahran’s growing extremism.
