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# The Long Warning: Inside the Intelligence Trail That Preceded Easter Bombings
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/the-long-warning-inside-the-intelligence-trail-that-preceded-easter-bombings/
- Published: 2026-09-07T15:19:03.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-07T15:19:03.000Z
- Author: Aruliniyan Mahalingam
- Tags: JM Exclusive, September 2026

**By Aruliniyan Mahalingam**

**JAFFNA —** On the evening of April 20, 2019, a man at his home in Puthukudiyiruppu took a WhatsApp call from an Indian police officer. The call came sometime between 5:15 and 5:45 p.m. The officer asked him an odd question: where were Sri Lanka's major churches?

The man named the ones that came to mind. The Madhu shrine. St. Anthony's at Kochchikade in Colombo. The Tewatta church at Ragama.

Then the officer told him that Zahran Hashim's group was preparing to strike Catholic churches the following morning, and that he should alert people in the government quickly.

The call was not the beginning of anything. It was the most consequential item in a traffic that had been moving across the Palk Strait for close to eighteen months, along a route that ran from a young man in Coimbatore who had once tried to reach the Islamic State, through the intelligence wing of the Tamil Nadu Police, through a former LTTE commander who had spent years in the Sea Tigers, and into the hands of a low-ranking Sri Lankan military intelligence operative in Vavuniya.

Sri Lanka has spent seven years arguing inside a seventeen-day window. India's warning to the State Intelligence Service arrived on April 4, 2019, followed by further information on April 18 and 19; on the evening of the 20th and again at first light on the 21st, the head of the SIS passed his own warnings to the inspector general of police and the defence secretary. Two of the country's most senior security officials have since been sentenced to death for failing to act on that intelligence. This account, based on months of reporting in the north and on interviews with people familiar with the operation on both sides of the water, describes the eighteen months that preceded it.

### PART ONE: THE MAN INSIDE

**Abu Hind**

In 2017, the Islamic State's declaration of a caliphate in Iraq and Syria was still pulling in young men across South Asia who had encountered it entirely online. One of them was a Muslim youth from Coimbatore, in Tamil Nadu.

His radicalization did not come through a recruiter. There was no local handler and no cell. "He was essentially alone," one source familiar with the investigation told the *Jaffna Monitor*. "He learned about ISIS by reading and watching material." He had become fascinated by the group's emergence and gradually convinced himself that joining it was a religious obligation.

The young man travelled to Turkey intending to cross into Syria. He was intercepted at the border and sent back.

By then he had drawn the attention of an intelligence apparatus much closer to home. Tamil Nadu's security establishment, including the Q Branch, was monitoring possible links between Muslims in the state and ISIS networks abroad, and officers took him into custody for questioning when he landed in Chennai.

Overseeing the state's internal-security intelligence apparatus was C. Easwaramoorthy, a senior Indian Police Service officer who had taken charge as inspector general of police for Intelligence (Internal Security) after his promotion in December 2016, with Q Branch matters under his supervision.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-1-14.jpg)

C. Easwaramoorthy

Questioning produced something the officers had not expected. Part of the ideological material that had shaped the young man could be traced to Zahran Hashim, the Sri Lankan preacher then building a radical following. Zahran's base was in the east, but his reach already extended well beyond it — to Mawanella, Maruthamunai in Ampara, Panadura, Matale, Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and other parts of the country.

At the same time, Zahran's own network was trying to make contact with the Islamic State and its structures abroad. According to sources familiar with the group, those attempts had repeatedly failed.

The Q Branch saw an opening.

Rather than treat the young man as a failed traveller, officers devised a plan to turn him and insert him into Zahran's network. The preacher whose material had helped radicalize him would become his target.

The Q Branch prepared him to present himself as a man with connections to the Islamic State, an intermediary who could help Zahran’s group establish contact with the movement.

To Zahran and his circle he became known as Abu Hind. They believed him.

The name itself carried a claim. *Abu Hind* means “Father of India” in Arabic, and the Islamic State often used such *abu* titles for men of significance. To Zahran’s circle, the name suggested its bearer was a person of standing in India.

## **Why the cover held**

By 2017, Sri Lanka had produced a cluster of radical preachers with formal religious education, whose credentials gave their message an authority that an online propagandist could not match. Zahran and Naufer Moulavi were among them. So was Rasheed Mohammed Ibraheem Moulavi, the younger brother of the man who led the Sri Lanka Jamaat-e-Islami for twenty-four years, handing over the organisation only weeks before the Easter attacks.

What the country had not produced was any structure connected to the Islamic State itself. Neither had Tamil Nadu, where investigators had encountered individual young men consuming ISIS propaganda but no comparable network of clerics openly aligned with the group. There was no Tamil-speaking ISIS apparatus anywhere within Zahran's reach.

That absence worked in two directions. It was why the group needed an intermediary in the first place. It was also why, when one turned up, there was no one to vouch for him and no one to expose him. Nor did the form of the approach raise suspicion: the Islamic State was by then running much of its overseas activity through remote handlers who dealt with local cells over encrypted messaging and were never seen, so a voice on a telephone was exactly what such a contact looked like.

Abu Hind did not have to manufacture the substance of his cover either. Before his recruitment he had immersed himself in ISIS propaganda thoroughly enough to convince himself to leave India for Syria, and the knowledge that had made him a security concern became his principal asset. "He already had all of this material in his head," one source familiar with the operation said. "That was why he had wanted to go to Syria in the first place." Q Branch officers trained him in the mechanics of the persona — how to communicate with Zahran's circle, how to handle questions, how to conduct himself without exposing the operation behind him. The ideology required no instruction.

One more thing helped. Zahran's circle was not, in this period, a clandestine network in any serious sense. A Muslim who watched the radical circles around him told the *Jaffna Monitor* that as early as 2016, Zahran and people associated with him would discuss matters he considered sensitive in relatively open online groups. "Zahran's group was not like the LTTE," he said. "There wasn't that level of secrecy."

## **What Zahran believed**

Evidence later given before Sri Lanka's Presidential Commission of Inquiry indicates how completely the deception worked.

The commission's final report records testimony that Zahran believed Abu Hind was the Islamic State's regional representative, and found that Abu Hind was in contact with Zahran and his brother Rilwan and had communicated with Naufer Moulavi.

Zahran's wife, Abdul Cader Fathima Hadiya, testified before the commission on Oct. 20, 2020\. Her evidence indicated that a man identifying himself as Abu Hind, based in India, began communicating with Zahran around the end of 2017 and remained in frequent contact through 2019\. According to accounts of her testimony later cited in Parliament, whenever Abu Hind called, Zahran would ask her to leave the room.

## **Across the water**

The contact began online and may not have stayed there. According to credible sources who spoke with the *Jaffna Monitor*, Abu Hind may subsequently have met Zahran and members of his group in person, after Zahran travelled clandestinely to India by boat. The sources said a Muslim politician helped arrange the journey.

The occasion was Zahran's younger brother, Mohamed Rilwan, who was being treated in India.

Rilwan had been badly injured at Palamunai, near Kattankudy, on Aug. 27, 2018, while making or testing a device. The blast damaged his hands and eyes, leaving him with missing fingers and impaired vision. Publicly available records establish that he was first treated at the National Hospital in Colombo under a false name. Sources told the *Jaffna Monitor* that his treatment did not end there, that he was subsequently taken to India, and that Zahran travelled by boat in connection with it.

## **The clock accelerates**

What changed everything for Zahran was a chain of four incidents, each of which brought investigators closer to him.

The first was the killing of the two constables at Vavunathivu on Nov. 30, 2018\. At the time it was read as a possible LTTE revival, and the investigation went in that direction.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-2-13.jpg)

Police constables Dinesh Ganesh and Niroshan Indika Prasanna, who were killed by members of Zahran Hashim’s group at Vavunathivu on Nov. 30, 2018.

The second came a month later. In late December, several young men on motorcycles damaged Buddha statues in and around Mawanella, hacking at their faces and hands with sharp tools. The Parliamentary Select Committee later identified those responsible as members of Zahran's group, and investigators established that Zahran himself had spent months living in Mawanella during 2018.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-3-11.jpg)

One of the Buddha statues damaged in Mawanella in December 2018.

Two of the alleged ringleaders, the brothers Mohamed Sadiq Abdul Haq and Mohamed Shahid Abdul Haq, evaded arrest. They were sons of Rasheed Mohammed Ibraheem Moulavi, the Jamaat-e-Islami leader's brother. The two remained at large until they were picked up a week after the bombings.

The interrogation of those detained for the vandalism led investigators west, to the coast.

On Jan. 16, 2019, the CID raided a coconut estate at Lacktowatta, in Wanathawilluwa, Puttalam district, and recovered explosives, chemicals, detonators and ISIS-related material. Four men were arrested and detained under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. The estate had served as a safe house and a training ground. An internal SIS memorandum in March would record that the Abdul Haq brothers had been hiding there from late December into early January, manufacturing explosives.

Wanathawilluwa was the point at which suspicions about the group were backed by concrete evidence.

The state moved, on paper. On Jan. 26 the CID began tracking Zahran's movements. On Jan. 31 the SIS gave the CID a list of 129 individuals it assessed as influenced by ISIS ideology, with Zahran among them. On Feb. 2, the SIS director discussed the Wanathawilluwa recovery and its connection to Zahran at a National Security Council meeting. Zahran went into hiding.

The fourth incident was a shooting.

On March 9, 2019, gunmen shot Mohamed Thasleem, a coordinating secretary to Minister Kabir Hashim, in Danagama, Mawanella. Thasleem had quietly assisted the CID investigation into the Dec. 26 Buddha statue attacks, helping lead investigators to Wanathawilluwa and the group’s largest arms cache. He survived. The gunmen used service revolvers taken from the two constables killed at Vavunathivu.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-4-10.jpg)

Fathima visits her husband, Mohamed Thasleem, in the hospital after he was shot in March 2019.

Then the investigators reached Zahran's household. The Terrorism Investigation Division went to a house associated with him at Kekunugolla, in the Kurunegala area, according to sources familiar with the investigation, and questioned his wife.

Zahran became convinced that his arrest was only a matter of time, and that carried a particular meaning for him. His interpretation of Islam, the sources said, held that surrendering to, or being captured by, forces he regarded as *kafir* (unbelievers ) was unacceptable. Faced with an arrest he believed was coming, he decided he should die carrying out an attack instead.

Until then, the group had been working toward the Kandy Esala Perahera, one of the country's largest Buddhist festivals, which falls in July and August. The festival was still months away. Zahran no longer believed he could wait that long. The decision to abandon the timetable appears to have been taken in March.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/WhatsApp-Image-2026-09-07-at-20.16.10.jpeg)

Naufer Moulavi 

Naufer Moulavi disagreed with the acceleration. According to sources who spoke with the *Jaffna Monitor*, he argued that the group should not abandon its plan because Zahran feared arrest. The dispute was never about whether killing innocent people was wrong. Neither man objected to that. It was about where and when. The disagreement hardened into a rupture, and Naufer and several of those aligned with him parted ways with Zahran in the weeks before Easter.

The preparations moved fast after that. On April 16, five days before Easter Sunday, Zahran's group carried out a test explosion at Kattankudy, detonating a device on a motorcycle at Palamunai. The Attorney General would later treat it as a distinct offence in the indictments. It was the second explosion at Palamunai in eight months; the first, on Aug. 27, 2018, had been an accident, and had cost Rilwan his fingers and much of his sight.

The split damaged the Indian operation at the worst possible moment.

By then Abu Hind had spent well over a year building relationships across the broader network, winning the trust of Zahran and of the men around him while reporting what he learned to the Q Branch. When Naufer's faction broke away, several of those contacts went with it. Some of the people through whom Abu Hind had understood what was happening inside the organization were no longer part of the group preparing the attack.

His window narrowed precisely as the circle behind it became most dangerous. He retained contact with Zahran's side and continued to receive information from within the network, according to the sources, but the access was no longer what it had been.

## PART TWO: THE CHANNEL

## **The man in Puthukudiyiruppu**

The intelligence Abu Hind provided did not remain in Tamil Nadu.

According to sources familiar with the operation, the Q Branch had an unusual channel for passing information to Sri Lanka's security establishment. At the centre of it was a former LTTE member widely known in the Vanni as "Thampi Anna."

His name is Thiyagarasa Arutchelvam (தியாகராசா அருட்செல்வம்), born in 1967 at Vettilaikkerni in the Jaffna district.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-5-10.jpg)

Thiyagarasa Arutchelvam, widely known as “Thampi Anna.”

Arutchelvam joined the LTTE in 1985, according to former members of the organization who spoke with the *Jaffna Monitor*. He served with the Sea Tigers until 1995, rising to a reasonably senior position and operating mainly in the Mannar region; in 1992 and 1993 he ran the organization's training camp at Polikandy. From 1995 to 2001 he worked in the finance wing, which sent him on clandestine boat trips to India to arrange supplies and manage financial dealings. From May 2004 until about July 2008, he was based in Mannar, responsible for bringing supplies from India by sea.

Around August 2008, the LTTE sent him to India to handle procurement in Tamil Nadu. He carried weapons with him, including a pistol, and the Q Branch arrested him on Aug. 23, 2008\. According to sources familiar with the case, the firearm was kept out of the file, and he was charged with lesser offences. He was produced before an Indian court, charged in six cases, and acquitted on Nov. 2, 2011.

Those sources said he avoided serious prosecution by reaching an understanding with the Q Branch and agreeing to work for it. He remained in India until January 2016\. During that period, as he sought clearance to return home, his relationship with Easwaramoorthy took shape. It continued after his return; whenever he later travelled to India, the two would meet. Sources who spoke to the *Jaffna Monitor* said the Q Branch came to regard him as a reliable source.

When he came back from India, he went to a plot at Puthukudiyiruppu that the LTTE had allocated to him and his wife during the war.

His wife, Thevika, had been a fighter herself. Former cadres identified her nom de guerre as Thanushiya (தனுஷியா) and said she served in the Malathi Regiment, the LTTE's women's formation. The couple have three children, a daughter born in 1998 and sons born in 2001 and 2003.

The family card listed his occupation as labourer. People who knew him said otherwise — the household appeared comparatively well off, and on the same land he put up a large modern house for a brother living abroad. Within the grounds he also built a small shrine to Sai Baba, acted as poojari himself, and drew a steady crowd from the neighbourhood to poojas every Thursday.

## **Saman**

After returning to Sri Lanka, Thampi Anna established a relationship with Military Intelligence in Vavuniya. His handler was not a senior officer. The *Jaffna Monitor* is withholding his identity and will call him Saman.

Saman was a lower-ranking officer who had spent years working in the region and was known by different names to different people, which is unremarkable in intelligence work. Former cadres who encountered him in custody said he generally dealt with them without hostility, which appears to have helped him maintain contacts among former fighters.

Thampi Anna became one of those contacts.

How the relationship began is unclear. The *Jaffna Monitor* has not established whether the Q Branch instructed Thampi Anna to cultivate Sri Lankan Military Intelligence or whether he made the connection himself after returning home. What is clear from the accounts of people familiar with him is that he kept his Q Branch relationship while reporting to Vavuniya at the same time. He had become an informant operating between two intelligence systems.

He was also acquiring a third contact. The *Jaffna Monitor* has been told that he developed a relationship within the State Intelligence Service during this period, and sources have described how it began. When Thampi Anna went to the Sri Lankan mission in India to obtain travel documents, carrying a clearance from the Q Branch and returning home legally for the first time since his arrest, a man acted as his translator.

He knew him only as Mohamed. Years later, the same man met him again in Mannar, this time as an officer of the State Intelligence Service, and the relationship continued for at least a year after the Easter attacks. When Mohamed told him that Suresh Sallay, by then head of the SIS, wanted to meet him, Thampi Anna gave him the cold shoulder. The meeting is understood never to have taken place.

The arrangement acquired a different significance in late 2017 and early 2018, when the Q Branch had Abu Hind inside Zahran's network. According to sources familiar with the Indian operation, the Q Branch passed material to Thampi Anna, who passed it to Saman in Vavuniya. Saman reported to his immediate superior, and from there it moved up the Military Intelligence hierarchy. Sources familiar with the arrangement said this was deliberate. The Q Branch was using Thampi Anna to move information about Zahran into the Sri Lankan system.

Everything that follows in this account passed through that one man.

## PART THREE: AMBITIONS

## **The party that would not have him**

While he was moving intelligence between two services, Thampi Anna was also trying to enter mainstream politics, pursuing several routes at once.

According to sources familiar with his activities at the time, his first serious attempt was the *Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi*. They told the *Jaffna Monitor* that he approached several senior figures in the party to secure a place for himself.

A news report published on Nov. 27, 2017, the birthday of the LTTE leader Velupillai Prabhakaran, said that Thiyagarasa Arutchelvam had joined ITAK, obtaining his membership through the TNA's Mannar district lawmaker, Charles Nirmalanathan. Arutchelvam said he hoped to contest the forthcoming local government elections as an ITAK candidate.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-6-9.jpg)

Thiyagarasa Arutchelvam, widely known as “Thampi Anna,” receives his ITAK membership from lawmaker Charles Nirmalanathan in 2017.

Sources who spoke to the *Jaffna Monitor* described a much older association between Nirmalanathan and Thampi Anna, dating to the latter's years in the LTTE. Those sources further claimed that Nirmalanathan helped him build a house at Puthukudiyiruppu. The *Jaffna Monitor* has not independently verified that claim.

He joined the party but was never absorbed into it. ITAK sources said the leadership remained wary, taking what one described as a "let us watch him" approach.

In his dealings with the party, he presented himself as a man with considerable influence among former LTTE cadres who had been through government rehabilitation, telling several figures that he could mobilise them and deliver their votes, according to people familiar with those conversations.

## **The monks**

He was working the other direction at the same time. Sources familiar with his political activities said he was trying to reach Namal Rajapaksa, and explored several channels to do it.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-7-7.png)

Buddist monks attends a reconciliation-themed Thai Pongal event organised by Thampi Anna in Puthukudiyiruppu in January 2019.

One of his principal contacts was Ven. Pahiyangala Ananda Sagara Thero, a Buddhist monk who later became associated with the Ape Jana Bala Party and contested the 2020 parliamentary election from the Gampaha district on its ticket, alongside several other prominent monks.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-8-7.jpg)

Thampi Anna with Athuraliye Rathana Thero at his home in Puthukudiyiruppu.

The association appears to have developed while Thampi Anna was still publicly aligned with ITAK. In January 2019, he organised a reconciliation-themed Thai Pongal event at Puthukudiyiruppu, which Ananda Sagara Thero and several other monks attended. His contacts extended further into the Sinhala clergy. On a separate occasion, Athuraliye Rathana Thero, a firebrand Sinhala nationalist monk, visited him at his home there.

He also established an organisation of his own, the North-East Social Reconciliation Organisation (வடக்கு கிழக்கு சமூக நல்லிணக்க அமைப்பு). A person involved with it told the *Jaffna Monitor* that he had been determined to have an organisation under his own name and made several attempts to register one before succeeding under the Companies Act. It ran a handful of small-scale community initiatives in the north, including in Jaffna, on drug abuse and violence.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-9-5.jpg)

The letterhead of Thampi Anna’s organisation, the North-East Social Reconciliation Organisation.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-10-5.jpg)

The logo of Thampi Anna’s North-East Social Reconciliation Organisation.

"Thampi Anna, in fact, wanted to become an influential figure in Tamil politics," said a person who knew him. "He wanted to be someone whom people needed."

## **"A good taskmaster, but not a task maker"**

People who dealt with him described a persuasive talker who knew how to approach people and win them over.

One person who helped him make contacts within ITAK said his political instincts did not match the image of a shrewd operator he tried to project. "He was a good taskmaster, but not a task maker," this person said, explaining that Thampi Anna was highly effective when given a specific assignment and would pursue it diligently, but was less adept at independent judgment or political leadership.

Several people who interacted with him came away with the same impression that he was not acting entirely on his own. His approaches struck them as unusually calculated, and some concluded he was being guided.

## **Campaigning for Sumanthiran**

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-11-4.jpg)

Thampi Anna, third from left, with M.A. Sumanthiran, second from left, at a meeting.

The calculations changed in 2020\. Days before that year's parliamentary election, Thampi Anna publicly backed the Tamil National Alliance and one of its most prominent candidates, M.A. Sumanthiran, who had no difficulty publicising the association.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-12-3.jpg)

M.A. Sumanthiran’s Facebook post announcing the North-East Social Reconciliation Organisation’s support for the Tamil National Alliance during the 2020 parliamentary election campaign.

On July 27, 2020, Thampi Anna and representatives of his organisation met Sumanthiran, then the TNA spokesman and a candidate in the Jaffna electoral district, at the alliance's office in Point Pedro and pledged their support. Sumanthiran announced it on Facebook the following day, noting that the organisation had also issued a leaflet calling on Tamils to unite and to declare Tamil nationalism their breath.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-13-2.jpg)

Thampi Anna and members of his organisation with M.A. Sumanthiran and other ITAK leaders

The leaflet went considerably further than the announcement. It invoked the LTTE's armed struggle and Prabhakaran directly, urging Tamils to support an alliance it described as embraced by the Tamil national leader. Tamil nationalism had survived the destruction of the preceding decades, it argued, because of the immeasurable price paid for liberation and the strength of mind gained through the armed struggle. It cast the TNA as a formation that had emerged, according to the needs of the time, from Prabhakaran's political and intelligence strategy.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/f0/aa/f0aaf7b7-6b61-437a-846a-1a80de683912/content/images/2026/09/the-long-warning-inside-the-in-dd2380-14-1-1.jpg)

A leaflet issued by Thampi Anna’s North-East Social Reconciliation Organisation during the 2020 parliamentary election campaign.

It accused the Sri Lankan state of turning to Tamil political actors to accomplish politically what it had failed to achieve militarily, and attacked the TNA's Tamil rivals across the field, from those advocating an alternative leadership and development-oriented politics with national parties to groups advocating self-determination and independent candidates.

Sumanthiran won a seat from the Jaffna district. The *Jaffna Monitor* could not determine how significant Thampi Anna's campaigning was to that result.

A man who was at that moment carrying Indian intelligence into the Sri Lankan military system was campaigning on a leaflet that praised the intelligence strategy of Prabhakaran.

## PART FOUR: WHAT THE CHANNEL CARRIED

## **Sermons**

The first material to reach Puthukudiyiruppu concerned a Muslim group in Batticaloa whose leader was delivering anti-Buddhist sermons on Facebook.

Easwaramoorthy sent Thampi Anna links to the sermons, according to sources familiar with the channel. Thampi Anna listened to them, made notes on their contents and passed what he had to Saman, doing this on two or three occasions. Easwaramoorthy continued monitoring the group and contacted him periodically with further information about it and its intentions; each time, the material went to Vavuniya.

It grew more serious over time.

## **The document**

During one of Thampi Anna's visits to India, according to credible sources who spoke with the *Jaffna Monitor*, Easwaramoorthy handed him a Tamil-language document connected to a Tawheed Jamaat organisation. It contained material on explosives and illustrations relating to suicide jackets.

Thampi Anna carried it back across the Palk Strait and gave Saman a copy. He gave a second copy to Ananda Sagara Thero, hoping the monk's political connections would carry the information to then-President Maithripala Sirisena.

## **'Major destruction'**

About six months before Easter Sunday, the warnings became explicit.

Easwaramoorthy told Thampi Anna that a Muslim group was preparing to cause major destruction in Sri Lanka, according to sources familiar with the exchange. That went to Saman immediately. Further information about Zahran's movements followed, including reports that he had travelled to India and elsewhere. It went the same way.

## **The Vavunathivu killings**

Four constables had been posted to a special search operation at the Vavunathivu checkpoint, on the road out of Batticaloa, on the afternoon of Nov. 29, 2018\. One left early for an alms-giving. Another left at 1 a.m., in the rain. That left two men at an isolated post about a kilometre from an air force detachment and three kilometres from an STF camp.

Their bodies were found at about 6 a.m. Constables Dinesh Ganesh, from the east, and Niroshan Indika Prasanna, from Galle, had been shot and their bodies mutilated. Their service revolvers were gone.

Suspicion fell on former LTTE cadres within days, with a motive attached. In the last week of November, police had blocked a Maaveerar Naal commemoration for the LTTE's dead. The theory that took hold was retaliation.

The Directorate of Military Intelligence submitted four reports on Dec. 5, Dec. 8, Dec. 14 and Jan. 3, making the case that former LTTE men had killed the constables in revenge for the blocked memorial, and naming the men it said were responsible.

They were innocent.

Rasanayagam Saravanandan, 48, a former Charles Anthony Brigade cadre from Vattakachchi in Kilinochchi, was taken into custody within days. Kadiramathambi Irajakumaran, known as Kannan, 40, a former LTTE intelligence member from Karaiyakanthivu near Batticaloa, was arrested soon after. Both were held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

The case against them did not hold together on its own. Shani Abeysekara, who had previously headed the CID, later alleged in a fundamental rights petition that the DMI and SIS had conspired to steer the investigation toward former Tamil militants and away from Islamist extremists, and that a motorcycle jacket produced as evidence against an ex-cadre had been planted. According to his account, the tip-off about the jacket came from the SIS chief, and when CID officers arrived at the place where it was supposedly found, SIS operatives were already there.

The truth came out only after Easter Sunday. A detained member of Zahran's network admitted that the group had killed the two constables, and by late April three men were in CID custody for it. The stolen revolvers were the same weapons used against Mohamed Thasleem in March.

The channel had been saying so from the start.

According to sources familiar with it, Easwaramoorthy contacted Thampi Anna shortly after the two constables were killed and told him Zahran's group had carried out the attack. Thampi Anna passed it to Saman.

Sri Lankan intelligence continued pursuing the LTTE theory regardless, and Saman repeatedly asked Thampi Anna to investigate along those lines. He refused. From his own years inside the organisation, he told his handler the killings did not resemble an LTTE operation. To him, they looked like the work of Muslim extremists, and he kept insisting that Zahran's group had done it.

The location of the stolen weapons came later, and by then it hardly mattered. On April 26, 2019, five days after the bombings, Easwaramoorthy told Thampi Anna that the constables' revolvers had been found at Sainthamaruthu — at the house where Zahran's brother and the last of the group had gathered and where they blew themselves up that night.

## **The test**

The motorcycle explosion at Palamunai on April 16 came down the same channel. Easwaramoorthy telephoned from India to say Zahran's group had carried it out, according to sources familiar with the traffic, and the information went to Saman.

## **April 20**

Thampi Anna was at home on the evening of April 20 when his WhatsApp rang.

Easwaramoorthy asked him where Sri Lanka's major churches were. Thampi Anna named the ones that came to mind: the Madhu shrine in Mannar, St. Anthony's at Kochchikade, the Tewatta church at Ragama.

Then came the warning. Zahran's group was preparing to cause major destruction at Catholic churches the following day, Easwaramoorthy told him, and he should alert people in the government quickly.

Thampi Anna called Saman immediately. By then the operative knew who Easwaramoorthy was and understood where the information originated.

"Sir, Zahran's group is ready," he told him, according to sources familiar with the call. "The Indian intelligence officer who gives me information has asked that the government be alerted."

The next morning, Thampi Anna was at the fish market in Puthukudiyiruppu when his phone rang. A bomb had gone off at Kochchikade, a friend told him. The caller, himself a former LTTE fighter, instinctively, and wrongly, assumed the movement was responsible.

“What the hell have they done?” he asked.

## PART FIVE: WHAT HAPPENED TO IT

Much of what the Q Branch sent across the Palk Strait in 2017 and 2018 would have looked, at the time, like fragments of a developing extremist network.

When the intelligence began pointing to a possible suicide attack, the Q Branch escalated the warning to India’s external intelligence establishment rather than relying solely on its informal channel into Sri Lanka.

On April 4, the warning arrived in Colombo through official channels, as a WhatsApp message to Nilantha Jayawardena, the director of the State Intelligence Service. Zahran Hashim and his associates were preparing a suicide attack on important churches. They had carried out reconnaissance of the Indian High Commission, which was itself a target. Six men were named, Zahran and his brother Rilwan among them. The message was confirmed in writing at nine the following morning, and a second Indian source sent the same substance three hours later.

Seventeen days remained.

On April 7 a top-secret letter reached Sisira Mendis, the Chief of National Intelligence. It set out the same warning and added the methods the group might use: a suicide attack, an armed attack, a knife attack, an attack with a truck. On April 8 the defence secretary was told, and advised that the police be informed. On April 9 the security chiefs met. That same day Jayawardena sent the inspector general of police a report identifying four of the six men India had named.

The test explosion at Palamunai a week later turned the intelligence specific. The reports that followed traced the motorcycle's chassis number back to Zahran's people, tracked the suspects' movements, logged their calls to numbers abroad, and described how relatives had been selling land to raise money. One noted that some of the men were carrying automatic weapons. Another recorded that officers at the Kattankudy police station had been in contact with a wanted suspect, Mohamed Shareef Adam Lebbe, known as Gafoor Mama, and had not arrested him.

Then, on April 20, the Indian counterpart messaged Jayawardena again. He wanted feedback on what he had sent at the start of the month. He added that the attack was expected "at any time on or before 21.04.2019," and that a dry run had already been carried out at Kattankudy.

That was the same evening a former Sea Tiger in Puthukudiyiruppu took a call from an Indian police officer and relayed the warning to his handler in Vavuniya.

The last message came at 8.27 the next morning.

It said the attackers would probably move within hours.

The first bomb went off eighteen minutes later.

***To be continued.***