Sri Lanka’s Trial-at-Bar sentenced the 15 men convicted over the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings to between 200 and 260 years of rigorous imprisonment late on Tuesday night, and ordered that every property they own be confiscated by the State.
The sentences were handed down hours after the same three-judge bench convicted 15 of the 24 accused and acquitted nine, closing the main conspiracy trial arising from the attacks on churches and hotels that killed more than 260 people.
Daily Mirror reported that the convictions rest on 23,270 charges, including conspiring to carry out suicide attacks on hotels, churches and other locations in Colombo and several other areas, and providing assistance and support for them.
Hiru News reported that the court additionally ordered the defendants’ fingerprints to be taken. The bench comprised Navaratne Marasinghe as president judge, sitting with Sujeewa Nissanka and Ramanathan Kannan.
Correction: the sentence is not a flat 220 years
Updated 23 September. Daily Mirror, Hiru and NewsFirst’s first reports all put the sentence at a flat 220 years for each of the 15 men. That figure was wrong.
NewsFirst filed an update giving a varied breakdown instead, and Daily Mirror has since rewritten its own report under the same article ID, replacing the “220 years each” headline with a per-defendant table. The two now agree.
| Accused | Sentence |
|---|---|
| 1st | 220 years |
| 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th | 240 years each |
| 6th, 7th | 200 years each |
| 8th | 260 years |
| 9th, 10th | 220 years each |
| 11th, 15th | 200 years each |
| 16th | 220 years |
| 18th | 220 years |
| 19th | 200 years |
The breakdown accounts for all 15 convicted men and reconciles exactly with NewsFirst’s totals — one at 260 years, four at 240, five at 220 and five at 200. The convicted are accused numbers 1 to 11, 15, 16, 18 and 19; the nine acquitted and the one accused who died during proceedings account for the rest of the 25 originally indicted.
This article has been corrected accordingly. The longest term, 260 years, went to the eighth accused; the first accused, Naufer Maulavi, received 220.
Mohamed Naufar Maulavi, named by prosecutors as the ideological organiser of the attacks, was among those convicted. The full list of those convicted and acquitted was published earlier on Tuesday.
One name still disputed
Daily Mirror’s report lists Husainul Rizvi Khalid Sameer among the nine acquitted. NewsFirst’s list of names places him among the 15 convicted, and puts Rasheed Mohamed Ibrahim in the acquitted group instead. The two accounts agree on the other eight acquittals and on the total in each group. The discrepancy has not been resolved by any outlet, and the court has not published a written order.
The sixth accused, sentenced to 200 years, told the court in mitigation that the people truly responsible remain free and offered to give evidence.
