-By A Staff Writer
(Lanka-e-News -03.May.2025, 11.20 PM) It was only a matter of time before Rohan Gunaratna’s reputation, built on a dizzying number of “terrorism expert” panels, TV appearances, and thinly-sourced paperbacks, began to collapse under the weight of its own implausibility. The man once hailed by cable news anchors as “Asia’s leading counter-terrorism analyst” is now facing multiple investigations — from Malaysia to Sri Lanka — and this time, no amount of pontificating about Al-Qaeda, LTTE remnants or ISIS-K splinters will save him.
In Malaysia, authorities have launched a formal inquiry into how Mr Gunaratna, armed with dubious academic credentials and a flair for self-promotion, allegedly gained unauthorised access to classified intelligence documents. Sources within the Malaysian Special Branch told The Times that Gunaratna posed as a researcher, using intermediaries “especially friendly” with Malaysian police and intelligence personnel to obtain sensitive material — a claim that, if proven true, could result in criminal prosecution.
Even more damning: Gunaratna reportedly fed false intelligence back into the system, accusing Malaysian Tamils of affiliations with defunct or entirely fictional Tamil militant organisations. These claims triggered costly investigations, wasted national resources, and, in at least one case, led to the detention of innocent individuals. One Malaysian police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confessed: “We chased shadows based on his footnotes.”
The fallout is spreading. Several publishers, long enchanted by Gunaratna’s dramatic prose and claims of front-row seats to global jihadist operations, are now reconsidering their relationships with the author. One prominent Singapore-based publishing house has reportedly pulled his titles from major book retailers after discovering that large portions of Gunaratna’s "research" lacked primary sources or were simply unverifiable.
Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka, authorities are preparing their own investigation into how Gunaratna managed to meet S. Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan — better known as Pillayan — while the ex-TMVP leader was still in prison. Gunaratna's alleged backdoor access to Pillayan, who was facing murder charges at the time, has raised serious ethical and legal concerns. The prison authorities have gone uncharacteristically quiet, while the Sri Lankan CID has begun a preliminary inquiry.
Adding fuel to the bonfire, immigration officials in Singapore are now said to be re-examining Gunaratna’s visa and academic credentials after questions surfaced regarding discrepancies in his declarations. One Singaporean immigration source dryly noted, “If he’s a professor, then I’m a panda.”
And in perhaps the most tragicomic twist yet, a panel of international scholars is said to be convening later this year to formally assess whether Gunaratna actually authored the books that carry his name. Rumours abound that ghostwriters, interns, and even unnamed military officers contributed large sections of his most cited works. As one British academic put it, “Reading Gunaratna’s footnotes is like looking for unicorns in a haystack.”
With all this drama, Gunaratna’s carefully cultivated persona — the suave, all-knowing counter-terrorism guru — is unraveling spectacularly. Foreign diplomats in Colombo now whisper about him with the same caution usually reserved for phone scams. His once-glittering contact book is growing dusty, and invitations to international security conferences have all but dried up.
From Sri Lankan prisons to Malaysian police briefings, from Singaporean immigration desks to nervous publishing boardrooms — the Rohan Gunaratna brand is under siege. Perhaps the real danger to national security was not the terrorists he invented, but the fiction he peddled as fact.
And as the saying goes in intelligence circles: you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fake a PhD forever.
-By A Staff Writer
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by (2025-05-03 18:17:13)
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