A Supreme Court ruling denounced former President Maithripala Sirisena and some of his top officials for what it called “reckless failure” to prevent the attacks, which killed more than 200 people.
Sri Lanka’s top court on Thursday ordered the country’s former president and several of his senior officials to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation to the families of the victims of terrorist attacks on Easter Sunday in 2019, a small victory in an island nation that has long suffered from a culture of rampant impunity.
The Supreme Court, ruling on a petition filed by families of the victims as well as church leaders and activists, said Maithripala Sirisena, the president of Sri Lanka from 2015 to 2019, and his top security officials had failed to prevent the carnage despite detailed intelligence reports suggesting such attacks had been imminent.
A series of coordinated suicide attacks by Islamic State-inspired assailants ripped through several churches and hotels in and around the capital, Colombo, killing more than 200 people. The attacks shattered a decade of relative peace in Sri Lanka, which was trying to emerge from a long, scarring civil war.
The devastating security breach was made possible by a coalition government paralyzed by infighting among its leaders. After the attacks, the crucial tourism sector dried up, and anti-Muslim mob violence spread across the country. The Easter Sunday carnage proved to be the first in a cascade of blows that left the island nation in the worst economic crisis in its recent history.
“I filed the case on the grounds that these officials failed in their duties, and the court gave its verdict that they had failed in their duties starting from the president at the very top,” said Saman Nandana Sirimanne, one of the petitioners, who lost his 19-year-old son and 21-year-old daughter in one of the bombed churches, St. Anthony’s in Colombo. “I knew in my heart that the state had failed us, and they were responsible for the deaths of my children.”
Mr. Sirimanne said that although the ruling brought some solace, it had fallen short of a jail term for the officials, which was what he was hoping for.
“There is no court in the world that can compensate me,” he said. “I will never get my children back.”
The Supreme Court was scathing in its ruling about what it said was the “reckless failure on the part of the executive branch of the government.” It detailed lapses of governance and security: The main perpetrator of the attacks, Zaharan Hashim, had been on the state’s watch list for several years. Security officials had received repeated intelligence in the days leading up to the bombings that he and his cohorts were planning large-scale bombings probably targeting churches, hotels and the Indian High Commission.
“This court cannot get away from an irresistible conclusion that the churches lay vulnerable and exposed to imminent attacks,” the judges said.