Colombo, Jul 1 (PTI) A Sri Lankan court on Wednesday ordered the former intelligence chief, arrested in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings, to surrender his laptop and mobile phone with their passwords to the investigators.
Suresh Sallay, a retired major general and former head of Sri Lanka’s State Intelligence Service, was detained by the police on February 25, as part of a reopened investigation into the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings.
The bombings were a series of coordinated suicide attacks on churches and luxury hotels that killed 270 people, including foreign nationals, and wounded hundreds more in the island nation.
The Colombo Fort magistrate delivered the order in the case, in which Sallay has been named as the third suspect.
The court further
rejected Sallay’s other requests so as to allow him in detention reading material and stationery and to remove the director of the police’s CID from the investigations against him.
Sallay has claimed degrading treatment under detention and wanted the investigations to be taken away from the director of CID Shani Abeysekera.
By fixing the next hearing for September 2, the magistrate ordered that Sallay be produced in court via video conferencing technology.
The attack, it was alleged, was to help back into power the members of the Rajapaksa family then in opposition.
The then government under President Maithripala Sirisena was blamed for its inaction to prevent the attacks despite prior intelligence from India on the impending attack.
Sirisena and his defence establishment was ordered to pay multiple millions as compensation to the victims’ families for negligence of intelligence.
Earlier in the day, Sallay’s lawyers claimed that the former official had ended his continued hunger strike upon legal advice.
Sallay, the lawyers claimed, was staging a fast from late May to protest his poor conditions under detention by the police’s CID.
However, there was no official confirmation about Sallay’s hunger strike.
The former intelligence chief was transferred to the Colombo National Hospital in early June as his health deteriorated when he allegedly began the hunger strike. Since last week, he was admitted to the cardiology unit as a precaution. PTI CORR NPK NPK
