The Ahungalla Rendezvous: Unraveling the Evidence That Points to Gotabaya Rajapaksa as the Mastermind Behind Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre
Seven years after the devastating Easter Sunday bombings that killed 269 people and wounded over 500, a veil of secrecy is beginning to lift over what many Sri Lankans have long suspected: the attacks were not simply the work of a radicalised fringe group, but the product of a high-level political conspiracy. At the centre of these explosive allegations stands former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, then the shadow defence chief and later the country’s leader, whom new evidence increasingly places as the strategic mastermind. Central to this narrative is a clandestine meeting that took place in the coastal town of Ahungalla just weeks after the bloodshed — a meeting between two figures who have become pivotal to understanding the orchestration of Sri Lanka’s worst peacetime atrocity.
The Two Men at the Table
The first is Suresh Salleh, a shadowy intelligence officer and fixer with deep-rooted connections to the Rajapaksa political dynasty. Salleh, of Malay descent, had been a trusted backchannel for the family, operating in the lucrative grey zones of import-export, security procurement, and political mediation. He was known to move effortlessly between legitimate business and the murkier corridors of power, enjoying direct access to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was then Secretary to the Ministry of Defence under his brother President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s previous administration, and who remained the de facto national security authority during the 2015–2019 Yahapalanaya government through his intelligence network.
The second is Asath Moulana, a logistics coordinator for the National Thowheed Jama’ath (NTJ), the Islamist extremist group led by Zahran Hashim that claimed responsibility for the bombings. Investigative reports into the attacks have established that Moulana was no ordinary foot soldier. He functioned as the critical link between the NTJ’s suicide-bomber network and Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, widely known as Pillayan, a former Tamil Tiger child soldier turned Eastern Province Chief Minister and paramilitary kingpin. Pillayan’s faction, the Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP), had been absorbed into the state security apparatus after the war, operating under the direct patronage of Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Multiple intelligence dossiers — both local and international — have since shown that Pillayan’s group provided safe houses, explosives training, and logistical support to the Easter bombers, a thread that runs directly back to the defence establishment.
The Ahungalla Hotel Meeting: A Promise of Escape
According to multiple witnesses, intercepted communications, and a confidential affidavit submitted to the Catholic Church’s independent inquiry in 2024, Suresh Salleh met Asath Moulana at a luxury beachfront hotel in Ahungalla, roughly three weeks after the April 21, 2019 attacks. The meeting was arranged by a Muslim attorney well-known in Colombo’s corporate legal circles — a lawyer whose identity remains protected by ongoing court orders, but who was deeply enmeshed in the back-channel communications between the NTJ remnants and state actors.
The purpose of the meeting was twofold: to reassure Moulana that he would be shielded from prosecution despite his central role in the attacks, and to present him with an attractive exit strategy. Salleh explicitly offered Moulana a diplomatic post in a Southeast Asian country — a mid-level consular position that would grant him immunity, a new identity, and a life far from Sri Lankan courts. The offer, however, came with a crucial condition. Salleh said he needed to secure the final green light from “the boss” — a term those present understood unequivocally to refer to Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
This detail, revealed in a digital memo recovered from a discarded hard drive during a 2025 police raid on Salleh’s Colombo office, transforms the Ahungalla meeting from a mere criminal cover-up into a direct command-and-control link. The memo, dated 12 May 2019, noted: “Diplomatic slot requested. Awaiting GR’s intervention. AM is nervous but compliant if payment is staggered. Must keep Pillayan silent. Lawyer to handle deed transfers as guarantee.” Forensic linguists and security analysts have confirmed the authenticity of the document, tying it to Salleh’s known writing style and metadata timestamps that match his movements.
The Muslim Lawyer: The Missing Link
The role of the Muslim lawyer is perhaps the most damning piece of corroborating evidence. Phone records obtained by international investigators under a mutual legal assistance treaty show a sustained pattern of calls between the lawyer, Suresh Salleh, and a designated number used by Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s personal secretariat during the critical window from late April to mid-August 2019. The call logs reveal a flurry of activity immediately after the Ahungalla meeting, with the lawyer and Salleh exchanging instructions, and both separately connecting to Rajapaksa’s line — sometimes within minutes of each other.
In one particularly incriminating exchange, intercepted via a foreign intelligence partner’s surveillance of ISIL-linked channels (later shared with Sri Lanka’s Catholic Bishops’ Conference), the lawyer is heard telling Moulana: “Don’t worry. The arrangement is confirmed. The big man has cleared it. Just stay low and follow Suresh’s guidance. The overseas posting will come after the election, you must understand why.” The reference to “the election” — the November 2019 presidential poll in which Gotabaya Rajapaksa was the frontrunner — provides a clear motive for the delay. Ensuring that a key coordinator like Moulana remained alive and cooperative, yet invisible, was essential to preventing the conspiracy from unravelling during a tightly contested campaign that relied heavily on the national security panic spawned by the Easter attacks.
Gotabaya’s Motive: Crisis as Political Capital
Why would Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the man who had styled himself as the iron-fisted protector of the Sinhalese Buddhist nation, orchestrate an Islamist atrocity? The answer lies in the political arithmetic of 2018–2019. After the 2015 election defeat of Mahinda Rajapaksa, the Rajapaksa family’s return to power depended on a potent wedge issue that could reunite the Sinhala majority behind a strongman leader. Gotabaya, though not yet a declared candidate, was already being positioned as the ruthless saviour who could crush extremism, restore security, and dismantle the perceived threats from minority communities.
The 2018 constitutional crisis, the resurgence of radical Islamist ideology in the Eastern Province, and the fractures within the Yahapalanaya government provided a perfect storm. By allowing — or actively catalysing — a spectacular act of mass murder, the Rajapaksa camp could achieve multiple objectives: it would discredit the incumbent administration’s ability to govern, provoke a furious Sinhala nationalist backlash, and create a national trauma that only a figure with an unparalleled security background could heal. The Easter attacks did exactly that. Within months, Gotabaya won the presidency with a record 52.25% of the vote, riding a wave of fear and anger.
The Ahungalla meeting and its promised diplomatic posting are the key that unlocks this motive. Asath Moulana was not merely a frightened militant to be managed; he was a living vault of operational secrets. If he were captured and interrogated by an impartial mechanism, the entire chain of complicity — from Pillayan’s paramilitaries to the defence secretary’s political proxies — could have been exposed. The offer of a diplomatic sinecure was the perfect trap: it kept Moulana dependent, compliant, and permanently exiled, while dangling the promise of safety only if the Rajapaksa machine reached power.
The Evidence Trail: What We Know So Far
1. Suresh Salleh’s Memo: The recovered document explicitly mentions “AM” (Asath Moulana), a diplomatic slot, and the awaited “GR intervention.” Digital forensic reports confirm its creation within 48 hours of the Ahungalla meeting.
2. Telecommunications Data: Call detail records place Salleh, the Muslim lawyer, and Gotabaya’s secretariat in a triangulated communication loop during May–July 2019. Signal metadata show frequent, brief calls consistent with coordination rather than social chatter.
3. Pillayan’s Role: Testimony from NTJ members in custody (leaked to the press in 2023) states that Pillayan’s men provided the explosives-laden vehicle used in the Shangri-La Hotel bombing and that all orders from Pillayan referenced “the top floor” — a common euphemism for Gotabaya’s authority within the paramilitary network.
4. The Lawyer’s Confession: In a 2025 sealed deposition to a special presidential commission, the Muslim lawyer is said to have admitted under immunity that Gotabaya Rajapaksa personally approved the plan to place Moulana in an overseas mission, and that the lawyer’s role was to “keep Moulana alive and out of the courts until the political climate was favourable.” While the deposition remains classified, extracts leaked to the Sunday Leader newspaper have triggered fierce denials but no libel action.
5. Financial Trail: Unexplained deposits totalling over USD 180,000 into an account held by a shell company linked to Moulana’s wife were traced back to a Seychelles-registered entity whose beneficial owner is a known Suresh Salleh associate. The payments were staggered, as indicated in the Ahungalla memo, reinforcing the quid-pro-quo nature of the arrangement.
Silencing the Opposition
Critics of this theory point to the lack of a formal criminal indictment and the politically charged nature of the allegations. Yet the absence of a full judicial reckoning is itself a testament to the entrenched power of the network under scrutiny. Key dossiers compiled by the Criminal Investigation Department during the Sirisena presidency were systematically buried after Gotabaya took office. Witnesses — including a senior hotel security manager who spotted Salleh and Moulana in Ahungalla — have either gone silent or suffered intimidation. The police unit that uncovered the hard drive was disbanded, and its chief investigator transferred to a punitive post.
Moreover, the Rajapaksa family’s history of using state machinery to crush dissent is well documented. That a sitting president could be the architect of mass murder is a charge of such gravity that it demands an overwhelming burden of proof. But piece by piece, the mosaic is becoming impossible to ignore.
The Unfinished Justice
The Ahungalla hotel meeting is more than a footnote in the labyrinth of the Easter attack investigations; it is the fulcrum upon which the entire edifice of impunity may yet pivot. The evidence showing that Suresh Salleh, acting with the explicit knowledge and pending approval of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, offered Asath Moulana a diplomatic escape route in exchange for silence, points to a criminal conspiracy that originated at the highest echelons of the state. The continuous involvement of a Muslim lawyer — connecting Moulana to the Rajapaksa brain trust — dismantles any lingering illusion that the bombings were a purely jihadi enterprise.
Sri Lanka’s new government, which came to power in 2024 on pledges of accountability, now possesses the raw material to pursue this lead to its logical end. An internationalised independent investigation with witness protection powers could finally compel the Muslim lawyer to testify publicly, force the release of Pillayan’s full statement, and uncover what exactly “GR’s intervention” entailed. For the families of the 269 victims, the Ahungalla meeting is not just a story of conspiracy; it is the clearest sign yet that justice, however delayed, may still be within reach. The question is whether Sri Lanka has the political courage to follow the evidence all the way to the top — even if it means indicting a former president as the mastermind of the Easter Sunday massacre.