-By LeN Political Correspondent
(Lanka-e-News -26.April.2025, 11.15 PM) It began, as these things often do, with the blood and horror of a Sunday morning.
It has endured, as such things often must, in the form of whispers, allegations — and one remarkable man with a borrowed name.
The Easter Sunday bombings of April 21, 2019, remain Sri Lanka’s most searing modern tragedy: a coordinated, brutal massacre that targeted worshippers and hotel guests, killing 269 people, including 45 foreigners.
Yet, five years on, the act itself has been swallowed almost whole by the metastasizing shadow of conspiracy theories — none more persistent than the suspicion that the carnage was not simply the fanatical work of Zaharan Hashim’s extremist group, but that it was helped along by elements within the Sri Lankan state itself to engineer political change.
The theory is simple enough: create chaos; offer security; install a “strongman.” That strongman, as conspiracy theorists allege, was none other than Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the former Defence Secretary turned presidential candidate, who swept to power seven months after the bloodbath.
An outlandish suggestion? Perhaps. Yet it gained astonishing momentum after a whistleblower emerged, not from the shadows of Colombo’s corridors of power, but from the wintry streets of Switzerland: a slight, wiry man named Azad Maulana.
In September 2023, Britain’s Channel 4 TV, that persistent thorn in the side of governments everywhere, aired an explosive documentary titled “Sri Lanka’s Easter Bombings.” Its central claim: key figures in Sri Lanka’s intelligence service, particularly Major General Suresh Sallay (then head of the State Intelligence Service), were involved in the fatal dance with the bombers.
At the heart of the documentary stood one man’s testimony: Azad Maulana — the political chameleon, ex-militant, journalist, and professional survivor whose unlikely journey from dusty Maruthamunai to Geneva’s marble foyers now held in his palm the credibility of an entire theory.
To understand why Azad Maulana matters — and why his reluctance to testify in Sri Lanka matters even more — we must first understand the man.
Azad Maulana, born Mohammed Milhilar Mohammed Hanzeer in 1983, was not always a teller of inconvenient truths. His life reads like a picaresque novel of Sri Lanka’s conflict years: son of a Muslim EPRLF militant (himself slain by the LTTE in Madras), teenage victim of poverty, trilingual graduate of Peradeniya University, and finally, secretary to Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan — better known as Pillaiyaan — leader of the TMVP, a government-aligned ex-Tiger faction.
In a country where political survival often requires the flexibility of a circus contortionist, Hanzeer, who adopted the nom de guerre "Azad Maulana" in TMVP ranks, proved uniquely adaptable. As the TMVP oscillated between paramilitarism and parliamentary aspirations, Maulana moved deftly between public relations, intelligence liaison, and party spokesman roles.
He worked closely with men of great ambition and, some allege, great moral flexibility: Karuna Amman, Pillaiyaan, and the hidden hands within military intelligence. He saw too much, heard too much, and finally — after a spectacular fallout with his political patrons — decided to say too much.
It was Maulana, speaking to Channel 4’s cameras, who alleged that Maj. Gen. Suresh Sallay had sought to "make a deal" with radical Muslim preachers like Zaharan in 2018. The idea, he claimed, was not to encourage terrorism, but to allow a limited strike that would create a national security panic — paving the road for the Rajapaksa dynasty's political resurrection.
Both Sallay and Pillaiyaan denied everything, of course. Sallay dismissed Maulana’s claims as "the fantasy of a failed political operator seeking asylum." Pillaiyaan, the grinning ex-Tiger now in government custody under the PTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act), went even further: he accused Maulana of fabricating stories for personal gain.
And Gotabaya Rajapaksa himself? His public statement, laced with characteristic disdain, noted that the Channel 4 documentary’s "central allegations hinged on the uncorroborated claims of one Hanzeer Azad Maulana, a desperate applicant for political asylum."
Yet here lies the heart of the matter: Azad Maulana is not simply a loud voice from exile. He is the missing link.
No other known source, no defector, no intelligence file (at least none available to public scrutiny) offers the smoking gun that Maulana promises — or threatens. His insider status with the TMVP, his proximity to intelligence operations, and his connections to multiple security figures give his claims a potential credibility that few others can match.
Potential, however, is not proof.
And herein lies the exquisite legal and political dilemma:
Without Maulana’s testimony under oath, there is no way to separate conspiracy theory from conspiracy fact.
For months, Catholic Church leaders, particularly Archbishop Malcolm Ranjith, have called for Maulana to testify — not through the unreliable, kangaroo-court mechanisms of Sri Lanka’s broken judiciary, but through an independent international investigation.
Maulana himself has been clear: he is willing to testify. But only under two conditions:
It must be before an international tribunal or credible international investigators.
It must guarantee his safety and immunity from reprisal.
Until those conditions are met, he will remain in Switzerland — tantalizingly out of reach — the ghost at the feast of justice.
Meanwhile, back in Sri Lanka, the political landscape is experiencing yet another Easter-related convulsion. Pillaiyaan, the TMVP leader, has been arrested under the PTA. Government ministers hint darkly at "startling revelations" to come.
Newspapers salivate over leaks suggesting that Pillaiyaan was, at minimum, aware of Zaharan’s activities and, at worst, complicit in the Easter plot.
Public anger, suppressed for years, simmers again. Catholic activists demand justice. Protestant groups file petitions. Opposition politicians smell blood in the water.
And through it all, like Banquo’s ghost, Azad Maulana’s absence is the one fact no one can ignore.
Without Maulana’s live, tested testimony — cross-examined, scrutinized, weighed — the allegations about the Easter attacks will remain suspended in the court of public opinion, never entering a court of law.
Yet perhaps it was always meant to be this way.
After all, conspiracy theories — especially ones with an internal logic but no definitive proof — are politically useful. They allow every faction to play its preferred narrative:
To the Catholic Church: evidence of systemic injustice.
To the Opposition: proof of Rajapaksa corruption.
To the Government: a useful distraction from economic collapse.
To international observers: a convenient cudgel against Sri Lanka’s geopolitical hedging between China, India, and the West.
In a world of competing truths, Azad Maulana’s silence has become more powerful than any speech.
In an age when whistleblowers are often simultaneously heroes and heretics, Maulana occupies a uniquely uncomfortable niche.
Is he a patriot, determined to reveal uncomfortable truths about a broken system?
Is he an opportunist, embellishing half-truths for asylum and revenge?
Or is he — like so many caught in the tragic undertow of Sri Lanka’s ethnic wars — simply a man trying, belatedly, to settle accounts with his own past?
Whatever the answer, one thing is clear: without Azad Maulana’s testimony before an independent panel, the Easter bombings will never find closure.
They will remain — like a scar half-healed, half-open — the crime that keeps on wounding.
And so, a former journalist with a dead father, a borrowed name, and a front-row seat to history now holds the key to one of Sri Lanka’s darkest secrets.
In a country where too many truths are buried with the bodies, that may be the most dangerous thing of all.
-By LeN Political Correspondent
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by (2025-04-26 18:26:14)
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