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A Sri Lankan court imposed a foreign travel ban on former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Wednesday as investigators widened their probe into the deadly 2019 Easter Sunday bombings.
Rajapaksa’s then-intelligence chief, Suresh Sallay, has been detained since February after being accused of orchestrating the attacks, which killed 279 people — an allegation he denies.
The Colombo Fort Magistrate ordered immigration authorities to prevent Rajapaksa and two other military intelligence officers from leaving the country.
“Should these three individuals travel abroad, it would be an obstacle to continuing investigations,” detectives told the magistrate.
The Criminal Investigations Department stopped short of naming Rajapaksa as a suspect, but it is the first time he has been directly linked to the case as a “person of interest”.
The coordinated bombings targeted three upmarket hotels in the capital Colombo, two Roman Catholic churches and an evangelical Protestant church outside the city.
Among the 279 people killed were 45 foreigners, while more than 500 were wounded in the attacks blamed on a homegrown jihadist group.
Sallay, a retired major general who headed the Military Intelligence, was made State Intelligence Service chief in 2019 immediately after Rajapaksa became president and is accused of involvement in organising the bombings.
British broadcaster Channel 4 reported in 2023 that Sallay was linked to the Islamist bombers and had met them prior to the attacks.
A whistleblower told the network that Sallay had permitted the attack to proceed with the intention of influencing that year’s presidential election in favour of Rajapaksa.
Two days after the bombings, Rajapaksa declared his candidacy and went on to win the November vote in a landslide after promising to stamp out Islamist extremism.
However, Rajapaksa was forced to resign halfway into his presidency in July 2022 after months of street protests over acute shortages of food, fuel and medicines.
