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# Zahran’s Network Is Regrouping in Eastern Sri Lanka, Ranawaka Claims
- URL: https://www.jaffnamonitor.com/featured/zahrans-network-is-regrouping-in-eastern-sri-lanka-ranawaka-claims/
- Published: 2026-09-29T07:47:07.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-29T07:48:27.000Z
- Author: Our Reporter
- Tags: September 2026

**COLOMBO, Sri Lanka —** Patali Champika Ranawaka, a former Sri Lankan cabinet minister, said on Monday that efforts were underway in the country’s east to revive the Islamist extremist network of Zahran Hashim, who led the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, and that some defendants acquitted last week in the main trial over the attacks had joined it.

Speaking at a news conference in Colombo, Mr. Ranawaka said a man named Siyam had been appointed in the Kalmunai area, in the Eastern Province, as a new leader of the network and was working to reorganize it.

“Recently, it was reported that a new leader has been appointed in the Kalmunai area to Zahran’s group,” Mr. Ranawaka said. “Through that leader, named Siyam, an attempt is being made to revive this group.”

He cited media reports for his claim that some of the acquitted defendants had joined the new organization, but did not name them or present other evidence. His claims could not be independently verified.

Last week, a three-judge High Court panel convicted 15 defendants and acquitted nine in the principal criminal case arising from the bombings. The attorney general’s department later said it would not appeal the acquittals. The coordinated suicide attacks on April 21, 2019, struck three churches and three luxury hotels and killed more than 260 people. Mr. Hashim, the leader of the National Thowheeth Jama’ath, was among the bombers.

In 2025, Sri Lanka’s public security minister, Ananda Wijepala, said intelligence agencies were monitoring an extremist group in the Eastern Province and that most of its activity had been reported in Kalmunai. No link has been established between that group and the one Mr. Ranawaka described.

Mr. Ranawaka, the leader of the United Republican Front and a founder of the Sinhala Buddhist nationalist party Jathika Hela Urumaya, said extremist movements were re-emerging in Sri Lanka and accused the government of failing to respond firmly.

He also criticized commemorations of Thileepan, a political leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who died on hunger strike in Jaffna in 1987, saying they were being used to rehabilitate the image of the separatist group, which government forces defeated in 2009\. Police removed a bust of Thileepan in the Nallur area of Jaffna on Sunday, after the annual commemoration ended.

“We can see, through the Thileepan commemoration, attempts being made to give a humanitarian face to the LTTE organization’s separatist brutality and to take steps toward strengthening LTTE separatism once again,” he said.

Mr. Ranawaka called for stronger use of counterterrorism powers to stop extremist groups before they became established, while acknowledging that the country’s Prevention of Terrorism Act was deeply flawed and needed to be modernized.

“Extremist movements that raise their heads here and there, whether Sinhala, Tamil, Muslim or of some other kind, must be immediately suppressed,” he said. “Our intelligence services and security forces must be kept on alert.”