Sri Lanka convicts 15 men in 2019 Easter bombings, sentences exceed 200 years each

On a Tuesday in late September, a three-judge panel in Colombo's High Court handed down sentences that stretched across centuries. Fifteen men received prison terms ranging from 200 to 260 years each, convicted of roles in the Easter Sunday bombings that tore through Sri Lanka on April 21, 2019. Fourteen of the defendants were found guilty on all counts—murder, conspiracy to commit terrorism, and possession of firearms and explosives under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The fifteenth was convicted on some charges only. The court also ordered the seizure of their property and assets. All have the right to appeal to the Supreme Court.

The attacks themselves had been methodical and devastating. On that Sunday morning, coordinated suicide blasts struck three churches and three luxury hotels across the country. The toll was 279 dead and 574 wounded—among the deadliest attacks in Sri Lankan history. Investigators determined that a local Islamist extremist group had orchestrated the violence. The 15 men now convicted were not the bombers themselves but the support network: they were accused of providing material and logistical assistance to those who carried out the attacks.

The trial that led to Tuesday's verdict had consumed nearly five years. Authorities had filed 23,270 charges against 25 suspects, all from Sri Lanka's Muslim minority community. The case called 2,300 witnesses to testify. One of the original 25 accused died while awaiting trial. Nine others were acquitted. Among those convicted was Mohamed Ibrahim Mohamed Naufer, an Islamic cleric alleged to have led the operation. Prosecutors argued that Naufer had radicalized the other defendants through his teachings. He received 240 years in prison with hard labor—the longest sentence handed down.

But the conviction of these 15 men has not closed the chapter on the bombings. A separate investigation is now examining whether elements within the Sri Lankan state itself bore responsibility for the attacks. The country's former intelligence chief, Suresh Salley, was arrested on accusations that he played a role in masterminding the violence—charges he denies. The investigation has already yielded other consequences: in July, a former police chief and a former senior Defense Ministry official were sentenced to death for failing to act on foreign intelligence warnings that the attacks were coming. A parliamentary committee had found that police and intelligence officials had received and ignored those warnings before April 21, 2019.

The convictions represent the formal legal reckoning for those who supported the bombers. But the broader question of how the attacks were possible—what institutional failures, what connections between extremists and state actors, what warnings were missed or suppressed—remains under investigation. The sentences are final in their severity, but the full accounting of what happened, and why, is still unfolding.