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Lankans arrested in Gujarat over terrorism charges: India, Sri Lanka findings vary while university don warns of post-Easter Sunday failures
‘We should ask India to hand them over to us’
By Shamindra Ferdinando
The findings made by Indian and Sri Lankan security and intelligence authorities about the recent arrest of four Sri Lankans on the suspicion of being religious extremists are contradictory.
While Gujarat Anti-Terrorist Squad declared that the suspects had been involved with the Islamic State terror group, investigations conducted by Sri Lankan authorities claimed they weren’t linked to Islamic State or any other extremist group.
Even in the Easter Sunday carnage case it was India that repeatedly tipped off local law enforcers here of the impending threat. Despite being armed with such vital advance intelligence local law enforcers failed to prevent the terror strikes.
However, authorities here have acknowledged the possibility of them being used by religious extremists for some destructive purpose.
The suspects have been identified as Mohammad Nusrat (35), Mohammad Nafran (27), Mohammad Faris (35), and Mohammad Rashdeen (43). According to police Nufran (or Nafran) is the son of the first wife of Mohammed Niyas Nauffer alias Kudu Naufer, an underworld criminal who was sentenced to death for ordering the death of Colombo High Court judge Sarath Ambepitiya in 2004.
Following the arrests in Gujarat, police here took into custody six men, including Pushparaja Osman, 46, in Colombo a few days ago. Although the media described Osman as the handler of the men now held in Gujarat, a section of the Indian media earlier claimed that their handler was based in Pakistan.
Authoritative sources said that Sri Lanka and India have exchanged their findings regarding the arrests made at the Sardar Vallabhai Patel airport in Ahmedabad on 19 May. The four men had taken an Indigo flight from the Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) to Chennai on 19 May. From there they had taken a domestic flight to Ahmedabad where they were arrested.
Sources said that the four persons who had been arrested in Gujarat and the six persons apprehended here subsequently could be categorised as drug peddlers, drug addicts and smugglers.
Immediately after India alerted Sri Lanka of the Gujarat arrests, police raided the homes of the four suspects but couldn’t find any incriminating evidence.
Sources said over the weekend that so far Sri Lankan investigators hadn’t received an opportunity to question the suspects held in Gujarat. “There is constant pressure as the current investigation is being conducted against the backdrop of still ongoing 2019 Easter Sunday probe. The arrests made during the final phase of Indian parliamentary polls naturally led to various possible theories,” a person familiar with such investigations said.
The Indian media quoted Gujarat Director General of Police Vikas Sahay as having said that the suspects told investigators that they had been earlier associated with the banned Sri Lankan radical militant outfit, National Thowheeth Jamaath (NJT), and joined IS after getting in touch with Pakistani handler Abu Bakr Al Bagdadi.
The NTJ has been blamed for Easter Sunday attacks that claimed the lives of nearly 270, including 11 Indians.
The Indian High Commission spokesperson yesterday (3) said that they didn’t have any comment on the issue at the moment.
The ongoing local investigation took an unexpected turn when the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) arrested Dr. Punsara Amarasinghe on May 29 over his high profile declaration of the arrested persons’ direct involvement with religious extremism. The controversial comments were made during an interview with Dilan Mayadune on ‘Rathu Miniththuwa’ on Hiru. Dr. Amarasinghe was granted bail on the same day.
The lecturer attached to the Kotelawela Defence University (KDU) declared that all four arrested in Gujarat had been identified as radicalised youth following the Easter Sunday investigations. According to the academic, they had been among 300 to 400 persons so categorised though local authorities never found anything to link them to terrorism. The academic declared a direct link between the arrested and the NTJ.
Mayadunne told The Island that they had interviewed Dr. Amarasinghe on the issue as he was a much respected authority on the subject. Of the four arrested in Gujarat, two had been to India on 38 and 40 occasions whereas two were there for the first time, Dr. Amarasinghe said, while describing them as ordinary people.
Responding to a spate of questions posed by Hiru journalist, Dr. Amarasinghe found fault with the Wickremesinghe-Rajapaksa government for lifting restrictions imposed on religious extremism last year while blaming governments that came to power post-Easter Sunday carnage for their failure to implement a proper rehabilitation programme. Dr. Amarasinghe alleged that instead, those who had been held and under rehabilitation, including a person (he named though we refrain from doing so) who encouraged religious extremism. Referring to that particular person, Dr. Amarasinghe questioned the failure on the part of relevant authorities to arrest him though been alerted by Indian authorities in early 2018.
Dr. Amarasinghe alleged that in spite of devastating Easter Sunday carnage, political and security authorities had failed to adopt appropriate strategy to counter the still growing threat posed particularly by Islamic religious extremism.
Unless the government resorted to a proper action plan, attacks similar to Easter Sunday could happen again, Dr. Amarasinghe warned.
Comparing the measures taken by India in the wake of major terror attacks such as raid on Mumbai by Pakistan based Lashkar-e-Tayyib in Nov 2008, and post-Easter Sunday security measures here, Dr. Amatasinghe was of the opinion that Sri Lanka was yet to put in place cohesive action plan. The scholar pointed out that those who had been trying to cause mayhem in India couldn’t mount a single successful attack over the past five years due to strict vigilance on the part of India.
Dr. Amarasinghe didn’t mince his words when he declared that various interested parties constantly brought pressure on the government to go slow on those promoting religious extremism.
Referring to the unprecedented Oct 7 Hamas raid on Israel that resulted in the ongoing Gaza war, Dr. Amarasinghe said that consequences of major intelligence failures could be quite devastating. The KDU lecturer defended the Indian move to arrest the four Sri Lankans after they arrived in Ahmedabad via Chennai without alerting Sri Lankan authorities. India was responding to an immediate threat and in such a situation, wouldn’t have shared available intelligence with their counterparts for obvious reasons, Dr. Amarasinghe said, declaring that the Gujarat Anti-Terrorism Squad’s response to the immediate threat posed by external elements was most appropriate.
The academic stressed the urgent need to enact efficient anti-terrorism law as part of the overall measures to counter the worldwide threat posed by religious extremists. He said that the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) introduced in 1979 was insufficient to meet the threat, whereas India had protected its interests with a slew of laws enacted over a period of time.
Pointing out that Counter Terrorism legislation was still in its draft stage, Dr. Amarasinghe expressed concern how the parliament handled the enactment of the new law.
Dr. Amarasinghe alleged that even five years after the Easter Sunday carnage, the religious extremism was on the march here un-checked, hence the responsibility on the part of the powers that be to take tangible measures without delay. Urging the government to keep Madrasa Islamic schools under close watch, Dr. Amarasinghe stressed the pivotal importance of maintaining links and sustaining close cooperation with Indian intelligence services. The academic explained how the negligence on the part of Sri Lanka led to the Easter Sunday carnage four years after the disclosure of a person reaching Syria via Turkey in 2015.
Dr. Amarasinghe said that Sri Lanka should ask India to hand over the suspects to Colombo. He called for a genuine effort to neutralise those who had been in touch with the four arrested in Gujarat and those who facilitated them to reach Ahmedabad.
On 17 February, the Indian Navy posted a cheerful message on X.
“Welcome!” it wrote, greeting the Iranian warship Iris Dena as it steamed into the port of Visakhapatnam to join an international naval gathering.
Photographs showed sailors in crisp whites and a grey frigate gliding in the sea harbour on a clear day. The hashtags spoke of “Bridges of Friendship” and “United Through Oceans”.
Two weeks later the ship, carrying 130 sailors, lay at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. It had been torpedoed by a US submarine off Sri Lanka’s southern coast on 4 March.
Commissioned in 2021, the Dena was a relatively new vessel – a Moudge-class frigate of Iran’s Southern Fleet, which patrols the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman.
According to US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, the vessel “thought it was safe in international waters” but instead “died a quiet death”. Rescue teams from Sri Lanka have recovered at least 87 bodies. Only 32 sailors survived.
The sinking marks a dramatic widening of the war between America, Israel and Iran. And, though it occurred in international waters of the Indian Ocean and outside India’s jurisdiction, it is an awkward moment for Delhi.
“The war has come to our doorsteps. That is not a good thing,” says retired Vice Admiral Arun Kumar Singh.
For some strategists, the episode carries broader implications for India’s regional standing.
Indian strategic affairs expert Brahma Chellaney wrote on X that the US torpedoing of the Iranian warship in India’s “maritime neighbourhood” was “more than a battlefield episode” – calling it a “strategic embarrassment” for Delhi.
“By sinking a vessel returning from an Indian-hosted multilateral exercise, Washington effectively turned India’s maritime neighbourhood into a war zone, raising uncomfortable questions about India’s authority in its own backyard,” Chellaney wrote.
Just days before its destruction, the Dena had been a diplomatic guest of the Indian Navy.
The ship had travelled to Visakhapatnam, a sun-washed port city on India’s east coast, to participate in the International Fleet Review 2026 and Exercise Milan, a large multilateral naval exercise meant to showcase India’s growing maritime leadership.
Seventy-four countries and 18 warships took part in the events, which Delhi described as a demonstration of its ambition to become the Indian Ocean’s “preferedsecurity partner”.
Visiting ships at such multilateral exercises usually do not carry a full combat load of live munitions, unless scheduled for a live-fire drill, according to Chellaney. Even during the sea phase, when drills and live firing take place, ships carry only tightly controlled ammunition limited to the specific exercises.
Singh, an invitee to the event, recalls seeing the warship and its Iranian sailors in Visakhapatnam just days before its fate changed.
“I saw the boys marching in front of me,” he says of the Iranian naval contingent during the parade along the seafront, just 10m away. “All young people. I feel very sad.”
He says on 21 February, the assembled ships – including the Iranian vessel – sailed out for the sea phase of Exercise Milan, scheduled to run until 25 February.
“What happened next is less clear: the ship may have returned to port or peeled away after exercises. Either way, the waters where it was later sunk – off Galle in Sri Lanka – lie only two to three days’ sailing from India’s east coast,” Singh says. What the ship was doing in the 10-12 days in between is not clear.
Singh, who has commanded submarines, believes the sequence leading up to the attack was probably straightforward.
The US, he notes, tracks vessels across the world’s oceans. “They would have known exactly when the ship left and where it was heading,” he says. A fourth of America’s submarine fleet of 65-70 is at sea at any given time, according to analysts.
According to the Indian Navy, the Iranian warship had been operating about 20 nautical miles west of Galle – roughly 23 miles (37km) – in waters that fall under Sri Lanka’s designated search-and-rescue zone.
The attack, Singh says, appears to have involved a single Mark-48 torpedo, a heavyweight weapon carrying about 650 pounds of high explosive, capable of snapping a ship in two. Video footage suggests the submarine may have fired from 3-4km away, around 05:30 local time.
The aftermath was grim and swift.
The warship reportedly sank within two to three minutes, leaving little time for rescue. “It’s a miracle they managed to send an SOS,” Singh says, which was picked up by the Sri Lanka Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre in Colombo.
According to the Indian Navy, a distress call from the Iranian warship was picked up by Colombo in the early hours of 4 March, triggering a regional search-and-rescue effort.
The navy said in a statement that Sri Lanka’s navy began rescue operations first, while India moved to assist later.
The Indian Navy deployed a long-range maritime patrol aircraft to support the search and kept another aircraft with air-droppable life rafts on standby.
A naval vessel already operating nearby reached the area by late afternoon. Another ship, which sailed from the southern Indian port city of Kochi to join the effort, continues to comb the waters for survivors and debris.
Under the Second Geneva Convention, countries at war are required to take “all possible measures” to rescue wounded or shipwrecked sailors after a naval attack. In practice, however, this duty applies only if a rescue can be attempted without putting the attacking vessel in serious danger.
Singh says submarines are rarely able to help.
“Submarines don’t surface,” he says. “If you surface and give up your position, someone else can sink you.”
Singh suspects the speed of the sinking – and possibly sparse shipping in the area at the time – meant few nearby vessels could respond. “A ship breaking up that fast leaves almost no chance,” he says.
In a shooting war, Singh says, the legal position is blunt.
Fighting between the United States and Iran had been under way since 28 February, with claims that 17 Iranian naval vessels had already been destroyed.
“When a shooting war is on, any ship of a belligerent country becomes fair game,” he says.
Many questions remain. Why was the Iranian warship still in waters near Sri Lanka nearly two weeks after leaving India’s naval exercise? Was it heading home, or on another mission? And how long had the US submarine been tracking it before firing?
For Delhi, the episode is diplomatically awkward.
India has drawn closer to Washington on defence while maintaining long-standing political and economic ties with Tehran – a balancing act the war has made harder.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has called broadly for “dialogue and diplomacy” to resolve conflicts, but has neither addressed the sinking of the Iranian vessel directly nor criticised the American strike.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi described the attack as “an atrocity at sea” and stressed that the frigate had been “a guest of India’s Navy”. Meanwhile Sri Lanka has taken control of another Iranian naval vessel off its coast after an engine failure forced it to seek port, a day after the US attack.
The episode has nonetheless sparked debate within India’s strategic community.
Kanwal Sibal, a veteran diplomat, argued that India’s responsibility may not be legal, but it is moral.
“The Iranian ship would not have been where it was had India not invited it to the Milan exercise,” he wrote on X. “A word of condolence at the loss of lives of those who were our invitees would be in order.”
Others like Chellaney have framed the issue in more strategic terms.
He described the strike as a blow to India’s maritime diplomacy. The torpedoing of the frigate in “India’s maritime backyard”, he argued, punctured Delhi’s carefully cultivated image as a “preferred security partner” in the Indian Ocean.
“In one torpedo strike, American hard power has punctured India’s carefully cultivated soft power,” says Chellaney.
As the debate gathered pace in strategic circles, India’s official response remained cautious.
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on X that he had held a telephone conversation with Araghchi, and also posted a photograph of a meeting with Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Saeed Khatibzadeh at a foreign policy summit in Delhi.
For military historian Srinath Raghavan, the legal position is clear: once the Iranian vessel left India’s shores, Delhi had no formal responsibility.
The strategic message, however, is harder to ignore.
“First, the spreading geography of this war. Second, India’s limited ability to manage its fallout,” says Raghavan.
“Indeed, the US Navy has fired a shot across the bow aimed at all regional players, including India.”
[BBC]
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Heat Index at ‘Caution Level’ in the Sabaragamuwa province and, Colombo, Gampaha, Kurunegala, Anuradhapura, Vavuniya, Hambanthota and Monaragala districts
Warm Weather Advisory Issued by the Natural Hazards Early Warning Centre of the Department of Meteorology at 3.30 p.m. on 06 March 2026, valid for 07 March 2026.
The public are warned that the Heat index, the temperature felt on human body is likely to increase up to ‘Caution level’ at some places in the Sabaragamuwa province and in Colombo, Gampaha, Kurunegala, Anuradhapura, Vavuniya, Hambantota and Monaragala districts.
The Heat Index Forecast is calculated by using relative humidity and maximum temperature and is the condition that is felt on your body. This is not the forecast of maximum temperature. It is generated by the Department of Meteorology for the next day period and prepared by using global numerical weather prediction model data.
Effect of the heat index on human body is mentioned in the above table and it is prepared on the advice of the Ministry of Health and Indigenous Medical Services.
ACTION REQUIRED
Job sites: Stay hydrated and takes breaks in the shade as often as possible.
Indoors: Check up on the elderly and the sick.
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Outdoors: Limit strenuous outdoor activities, find shade and stay hydrated.
Dress: Wear lightweight and white or light-colored clothing.
Note: In addition, please refer to advisories issued by the Disaster Preparedness & Response Division, Ministry of Health in this regard as well. For further clarifications please contact 011-7446491
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Prompt solutions will be provided for the salary anomalies prevailing within the teacher and principal services — PM
Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya stated that the government has paid close attention to the salary anomalies prevailing within the teacher and principal services and that prompt solutions will be provided following extensive discussions held with trade unions.
The Prime Minister made these remarks while responding to questions raised in Parliament on Friday (06).
Presenting data on existing vacancies in the education sector, the Prime Minister explained the current situation.
There are 903 vacancies existing in the Sri Lanka Education Administrative Service (SLEAS) and 3,790 vacancies in Sri Lanka Principals’ Service (SLPS).
In order to fill the vacancies which still remain due to various reasons, including selected officers not accepting appointments after the examinations and interviews conducted since 2021, interviews are scheduled to be held in the second week of March 2026.
Further, in order to fill the vacancies for the years 2021 and 2025, competitive examinations will be conducted in the future with the approval of the Public Service Commission.
At present, entry into the Principals’ Service is considered as a new recruitment. As a solution to the salary-related issue arising in this regard, a new Cabinet paper is being prepared seeking approval to consider appointments to the Principals’ Service as a promotion, thereby enabling appropriate salary conversion.
The Prime Minister also emphasized that sustainable solutions are required not only for salary issues in the education sector but also for salary-related concerns in several other sectors. Accordingly, the government plans to appoint a new Salary Commission. Through this commission, the government expects to provide lasting solutions to the issues faced by teachers and principals within this year.
In accordance with the service minute of the Principals’ Service, several training programmes have been made mandatory for the professional development of principals.
These include, Induction training at the beginning of service, capacity development training prior to promotion to Grade II and Grade I, and periodic awareness programmes conducted at provincial and zonal levels.
The Prime Minister further stated that discussions are undertaking with the Department of Management Services regarding the proposals submitted by principals’ associations. Based on the responses received, the government is prepared to take the necessary steps through the Cabinet of Ministers.
[Prime Minister’s Media Division]
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