By Maj (rtd) Hemantha Dayaratne/Daily Mirror

Colombo, September 16 –  Intelligence services worldwide do maintain links with criminals, radicals, and even terrorists to gather information, monitor plots, or infiltrate groups.  The Police, State Intelligence Service, and military intelligence worked in silos, plagued by mistrust. In this chaos, Zahran’s group slipped through the cracks.

Six years after the Easter Sunday bombings that killed more than 269 people in Sri Lanka, the search for a “mastermind” continues to dominate headlines.  

Zahran Hashim, the radical preacher who led the National Thowheed Jamaat (NTJ), is often named. A 2025 FBI affidavit described him as the “self-proclaimed leader of ISIS in Sri Lanka.” Others claim his colleague, Naufar Moulavi, was the real ideological driver. 

Adding fuel to speculation, a 2023 British documentary alleged that members of the Rajapaksa political family conspired with extremists in 2018 to stage a false-flag attack that would pave the way for Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s rise to power.  

Former President Maithripala Sirisena claims that the mastermind is well known to intelligence agencies, the military, and governments, yet remains beyond Sri Lanka’s reach and we cannot fight him.  

Archbishop Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith accuses successive governments of protecting the “big fish,” while President Anura Kumara Dissanayake vows to track down the figure.  

Yet the harsh truth may be that there was never a single mastermind at all. 

Why the mastermind model is obsolete 

In the past, terrorism was often shaped by powerful extremist leaders. Osama bin Laden directed al-Qaeda with precision, just as Velupillai Prabhakaran controlled the LTTE. But in today’s world, the “mastermind” model has become outdated. 

With advances in surveillance, cyber monitoring, and precision strikes, it has become nearly impossible for terrorist leaders to survive for long in hierarchical command structures. Israel’s assassinations of Iranian and jihadist commanders in recent years illustrate this point.  

Knowing this, global terror movements have shifted to leaderless terrorism: small, independent cells or lone actors radicalized online. These attacks are local in execution but global in ideology. In such a model, masterminds are liabilities, not assets. 

Inspiration, not command

The Easter attackers were radicalized by a toxic mix of local Islamist ideology and ISIS propaganda, not by instructions from a single hidden figure. 

The Christchurch Mosque massacre in New Zealand in March 2019 provided symbolic justification, not operational guidance. Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch gunman was shaped by online white supremacist networks and personal experiences.  

Zahran’s group followed a similar path, radicalized by ideology, inspired by global events, but operationally independent. That is why blaming everything on a “mastermind” is misleading. The attack’s power lay in decentralized radicalization, not top-down command. 

Intelligence links are not conspiracy

Much of the “mastermind” debate has been fueled by allegations of State involvement. Critics point to intelligence officers’ contacts with extremists before 2019.  

But such contact, though disturbing, is not unusual.  

Intelligence services worldwide maintain links with criminals, radicals, and even terrorists to gather information, monitor plots, or infiltrate groups.  

Contact does not equal conspiracy. Only if officers provided material support or actively joined extremist agendas can such links be deemed complicity. 

Conspiracy theories suggesting that the Rajapaksas and military intelligence engineered the Easter attacks for electoral gain may be politically tempting but, they oversimplify the reality.  

Jihadist movements pursue global political objectives, not narrow local ones. If Sri Lanka became a target, it was because it fit into ISIS’s broader vision, not because of domestic political maneuvering. 

Fatal blind spots

The real failure lies elsewhere. In Sri Lanka’s systemic weaknesses in intelligence and governance. Indian intelligence repeatedly warned their Sri Lankan counterparts about Zahran’s network.  

Yet, Sri Lankan authorities dismissed him as a marginal threat, loud and wealthy, but incapable of mass carnage.   Their focus was on returnees from Syrian combat zone, whom they saw as more dangerous because of their military training and battlefield exposure. This led to three major blunders.  

First, officials failed to see how deeply radicalization had spread within wealthy families, especially among the likes of that Ilham Ibrahim’s. Officials clung to the outdated belief that extremism was a poor man’s problem. As a result, the specific intelligence received from Indian counterparts was not passed down to field units and troops as actionable orders. 

Second, their skill in making massacring Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) from commercially available explosives was underestimated.  

Third, the lethal force-multiplier effect of an IED explosion in confined spaces, like a church hall or hotel dining area, went uncalculated. 

On top of this came political dysfunction.  

Rivalries between President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe crippled coordination.  

The Police, State Intelligence Service, and military intelligence worked in silos, plagued by mistrust. In this chaos, Zahran’s group slipped through the cracks.  

The Easter attack shocked Sri Lanka and the world, even surprising global jihadist leaders who had no direct involvement. It was not a high-level planned plot but “leaderless terrorism,” a strategy introduced and carried out by local extremists inspired by global networks. 

Chasing ghosts

Sri Lanka’s obsession with a “mastermind” reflects its past. The LTTE’s defeat in 2009 came only after Prabhakaran’s death. That victory conditioned our minds to think in terms of single leaders and top-down conspiracies. 

But the world has changed. Terrorism has evolved. The search for a mastermind in the Easter bombings is not just futile; it is a dangerous distraction. 

The true culprits are systemic failures. Weak political leadership, dysfunctional intelligence coordination, and complacency in the face of radicalization.  

Unless these are addressed, Sri Lanka will remain vulnerable, not because of hidden masterminds, but because of its own blind spots. 

The writer is a veteran Army infantry officer and has previously served as the founding Research Officer and Lecturer in the Department of Strategic Studies at KDU, International Media Officer at the President’s Media Division, and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi. He can be reached at hemanthadayaratne@yahoo.com

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