Saturday 5th October, 2024

The police top brass is reported to have held a meeting recently to discuss the progress of high-profile criminal investigations. Among the other issues taken up at the discussion attended by Secretary to the Ministry of Public Security Ravi Seneviratne, Acting IGP Priyantha Weerasuriya and other high-ranking officers from the CID, etc., were the probes that had been either delayed or derailed, we are told. Such discussions usually take place when governments change; they receive much publicity and hold out hope initially, but nothing come of them eventually. It is hoped that the aforesaid discussion will not go the same way as the previous ones.

For the first time in Sri Lanka’s post-Independence history, a government with no affiliations to the UNP or the SLFP or their offshoots, such as the SLPP, has been formed. The governments, led by those parties, did not go all out to investigate offences committed under previous administrations and bring the culprits to justice as they feared that they themselves would have to face similar consequences when out of power. This quid pro quo may explain why those who should have been imprisoned for various offences years ago remain free today. The prevailing culture of impunity is one of the reasons why the people supported the NPP in the recently-concluded presidential election.

The NPP administration will have to live up to their expectations. Its opponents argue that although the JVP, the largest constituent of the NPP, has not wielded state power previously, it was part of the SLFP-led UPFA coalition, which won the 2004 general election, and it honeymooned with the UNP during the Yahapalana government; therefore its track record is far from squeaky clean. The only way the NPP can prove its critics wrong and retain public support is to have the unsolved crimes committed under previous regimes probed thoroughly and the perpetrators thereof brought to justice.

One of the main election pledges of the NPP was to restore the rule of law and ensure that crimes would not go unpunished. The killers of Sunday Leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge and rugby player Wasim Thajudeen are still at large. The police obviously connived with the politicians and their kith and kin blamed for those crimes, and chose to drag their feet on investigations thereinto. The mastermind behind the Treasury bond rackets has not been traced, and no serious effort has been made to have former Central Bank Governor Arjuna Mahendran extradited from Singapore to stand trial for the scams. The state coffers lost billions of rupees due to the sugar tax scam under the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government. The need for a thorough probe into that racket cannot be overstated. The politicians involved in the on-arrival visa racket have not been arrested, and they must be made to face the full force of the law without further delay.

As for the Easter Sunday carnage, there is no need for another protracted probe. The Catholic Church has categorically stated that National Thowheed Jamath leader Zahran Hashim’s handler, who called himself Abu Hind, masterminded the terror attacks; Abu Hind’s real identity is known to the current Secretary to Public Security Seneviratne and the members of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry that probed the carnage, according to Spokesman for the Colombo Archdiocese Rev. Fr. Cyril Gamini Fernando. It defies comprehension why ‘Abu Hind’ has not been arrested yet.

There is no reason why the NPP administration cannot order high-level probes into the aforesaid scams and killings posthaste. Verbalising about the virtues of justice and the rule of law won’t do. Let the new leaders be asked to fish or cut bait.

Friday 4th October, 2024

Much is being spoken these days about the need to eliminate corruption, which has eaten into the vitals of Sri Lankan society. However, clean governance has been reduced to a mere political slogan in this country, and the corrupt continue to go places. While Sri Lanka is paying lip service to the task of ridding itself of corruption, former Singapore Minister S. Iswaran has been sentenced to one year in jail for receiving gifts worth USD 300,000 and obstructing justice while in office.

Charges against Iswaran included accepting expensive gifts such as tickets to English Premier League football matches, the Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix, London musicals and a private jet ride. If Sri Lankan politicians were to be prosecuted for such offences, most of them would be behind bars. The new government of Sri Lanka has taken moral high ground and is making a public display of what it calls its commitment to eliminating bribery and corruption. It has received praise from foreign diplomats for its anti-corruption drive, but its leaders are among the politicians who have received undeclared funds.

Iswaran, who held several key Cabinet portfolios, such as transport, communications and trade, had to resign as a minister last year, when his transgressions came to light. He initially protested his innocence, saying that he would fight to clear his name, but subsequently he pleaded guilty to five charges.

The Singapore court rejected Iswaran’s plea for leniency. Presiding Judge Vincent Hoong is reported to have said: “Trust and confidence in public institutions are the bedrock of effective governance, which could all too easily be undermined by the appearance that an individual public servant has fallen below the standards of integrity and accountability.” The classification of a minister as a public servant is of interest. Sri Lanka’s new government should seriously consider having Judge Hoong’s obiter dictum prominently displayed at all state institutions, here.

What basically made Singapore’s quantum leap from the ‘Third World’ to the ‘First World’ possible was its successful war on bribery and corruption under the unwavering leadership of Lee Kuan Yew (LKY), who also restored the rule of law. Clean governance has enabled the city state to retain its No 2 spot on the World Bank rankings for ease of doing business.

In a previous editorial comment on the arrest of Iswaran, we pointed out what LKY had said about ministers and officials in this part of the world. In his widely read book, From Third World to First, he has said: “The higher they are, the bigger their homes and more numerous their wives, concubines, or mistresses, all bedecked in jewelry appropriate to the power and position of their men. Singaporeans who do business in these countries have to take care not to bring home such practices.” When one sees Sri Lankan politicians and bureaucrats enriching themselves and living the life of Riley with impunity, one remembers LKY’s memorable words.

All Singaporean politicians who did not heed LKY’s aforesaid warning were severely dealt with. The fate that befell Teh Cheang Wan, the Minister for National Development, is a case in point. When the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau launched a probe into an allegation of bribery against him in the mid-1980s, he sought to meet LKY, who refused to see him until the investigation was over.

Wan took his life, and his suicide note said, inter alia, “As an honourable oriental gentleman I feel it is only right that I should pay the highest penalty for my mistake.” If the Sri Lankan ministers had received the same treatment as Wan from their leaders, most of them would have been pushing up the daisies by now, and the vital sectors such as health, education, finance, agriculture and trade and commerce would have been free from corruption, and, above all, fake and substandard drugs would not have snuffed out so many lives in the state-run hospitals.

Now that Singapore has set an example to other countries by throwing Iswaran behind bars, will it extradite one of its citizens, Arjuna Mahendran, to Sri Lanka to stand trial for his involvement in the Treasury bond scams carried out on his watch as the Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka? Singapore should help other nations fight corruption, shouldn’t it?

Minister of Public Security Vijitha Herath has said the new government will do everything in its power to have Mahendran extradited. Let him be urged to ensure that the Attorney General’s Department makes a formal request to the government of Singapore to that effect, again.

Thursday 3rd October, 2024

More than half a decade has elapsed since the Easter Sunday terror attacks (2019), which claimed about 270 lives and left hundreds of others with permanent injuries, but the survivors of terror, the family members of the deceased, the Catholic Church, civil society organisations and others are still crying out for justice. Sri Lanka has had four Presidents since the carnage that shook the world—Maithripala Sirisena, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and Anura Kumara Dissanayake––but, sadly, justice remains far from served.

Spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Colombo Rev. Fr. Cyril Gamini Fernando has revealed the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday attacks. Speaking at a discussion on Sunanda Deshapirya’s book about the Easter Sunday carnage, on Tuesday, at the BMICH, the prelate declared that the terror mastermind was the person who had identified himself as Abu Hind.

Whenever National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ) leader Zahran Hashim spoke with Abu Hind over the telephone, he ensured that everyone else was out of earshot, according to his wife Hadiya’s testimony before the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (COI) which probed the Easter Sunday attacks, Fr. Fernando said, noting that when the then SDIG in charge of the CID, Ravi Seneviratne sought to reveal who Abu Hind actually was, while testifying before the COI, he was asked not to do so; a commissioner jotted down a name on a piece of paper and passed it on to Seneviratne, asking whether it was the person the latter was referring to, and Seneviratne answered in the affirmative. One wonders why the COI prevented the true identity of Abu Hind being revealed then and there. Intriguingly, the COI final report says: “The CID investigators who testified before the COI informed that they are investigating the identity of Abu Hind. Those investigations should proceed (p 222).” If it is true that the SDIG of the CID had tried to reveal the real identity of Abu Hind, then one can ask why the COI has, in its final report, asked the CID to conduct a fresh probe. Interestingly, in March 2021, the then Attorney General Dappula de Livera instructed IGP C. D. Wickramaratne to conduct a thorough investigation in respect of Abu Hind, Ahamed Thalib Lukman Thalib, his son Lukman Thalib Ahamed aka ‘Abu Abdulla,’ Rimsan and Mahendran Pulasthini alias ‘Sara.’ They have been named in the COI report, under the Chapter, ‘Foreign Involvement’. There would have been no need for further efforts to identify Abu Hind if the CID had already done so while the COI proceedings were in progress.

The fact that Abu Hind was Zahran’s handler and masterminded the Easter Sunday attacks has been known since the submission of the final report of the COI to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in February 2021. We, too, have editorially pointed out that the terror mastermind is Zahran’s handler although the Gotabaya government insisted that Naufer Moulavi had masterminded the terror attacks. In May 2021, the then Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekera told Parliament that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had identified Naufer as the Easter Sunday terror mastermind. Claims made by outfits such as the FBI cannot be taken seriously owing to the allegation that there was a foreign involvement in the Easter Sunday carnage. Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, who was the Justice Minister in the Yahapalana government, has, in a recent television interview, attributed the Easter Sunday attacks to some geostrategic issues that the handover of the Hambantota Port to China gave rise to.

Fr. Fernando also said in his aforesaid speech that the military intelligence had been in touch with Jamil, an NTJ bomber, who was asked by a mysterious caller not to blow himself at Taj Samudra. While Jamil was behaving in a suspicious manner at a mosque in Dehiwala, after abandoning the Taj Samudra mission, he was questioned by a security officer, and he claimed that he was upset over a domestic issue. He gave the security guard his wife’s telephone number, asking the latter to check the veracity of his claim. The guard called Jamil’s wife, and a little while later a military intelligence operative used her phone to call him, according to Fr. Fernando, who said it was proof that the military intelligence had communicated with the bomber until he blew himself up in a guesthouse in Dehiwala on 21 April 2019.

Fr. Fernando also alleged that a truck travelling from Katunayake to Panadura had been stopped by the police near Gelanigama, but the OIC of the police station in the area had asked them to release the vehicle forthwith, and according to a log entry made by a police sergeant, the OIC had acted on instructions given by SDIG Deshabandu Tennakoon. That truck may have carried explosives and had it been checked, the Easter Sunday tragedy could have been prevented, the prelate said.

There are different narratives about the mastermind/s behind the Easter Sunday terror attacks. It is claimed in some quarters that the carnage was carried out to facilitate Gotabaya’s ascension to the presidency, but there is another school of thought, according to which there was a foreign hand in the terrorist bombings. The witnesses who expressly testified that there had been ‘an external hand or conspiracy behind the attacks’, according to the COI report, are Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, former President Maithripala Sirisena, former Minister Rauf Hakeem, former Minister Rishad Bathiudeen, former Governor Azath Salley, former SJB MP Mujibur Rahman, former SIS Director SDIG Nilantha Jayawardena, former STF Commandant M. R. Lateef, former Chief of Defence Staff Ravindra Wijegunaratne, former SDIG CID Ravi Seneviratne and former CID Director Shani Abeysekera.

Is Abu Hind Sri Lankan or foreign? An international expert on terrorism is quoted by the COI, in its final report, as having said: “Abu Hind was a character created by a section of a provincial Indian intelligence apparatus. The intelligence that the Director SIS received on 4th, 20th and 21st April 2019 was from this operation and the intelligence operative pretending to be one Abu Hind. Operatives of this outfit operate on social media pretending to be Islamic State figures. They are trained to run virtual personae (p 219).”

In trying to solve the Easter Sunday carnage mastermind puzzle, let’s apply the Occam’s razor method, which means that when there are two competing ideas, the simpler one should be chosen. Now that the Catholic Church has said in no uncertain terms that the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday terror attacks is the person who used nom de guerre, Abu Hind, and current Secretary to the Ministry of Public Security, SDIG (retd) Seneviratne and the members of the COI have been aware of his true identity, further probes to ascertain the true identity of the terror mastermind will be redundant.

‘Abu Hind’ must be arrested, interrogated and prosecuted forthwith if he is a Sri Lankan, and if he is a foreign national, as the aforesaid international expert told the COI, assistance of Interpol and the country where the suspect is residing must be sought to bring him to justice.