Former Sri Lankan president Maithripala Sirisena and four other top officials are responsible for failing to prevent the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings that killed 279 people, the Supreme Court said in a landmark ruling Thursday.
The island nation’s worst terror attack since the end of its ethnic civil war led to coordinated suicide bombings at hotels and Catholic churches, which also killed up to 45 foreigners and wounded more than 500 people.
The seven-judge bench ruled that Sirisena was negligent in not taking steps to prevent the attack, despite strong intelligence warnings two weeks earlier.
He ordered Sirisena, 71, to pay 100 million rupees ($273,000) to the victim’s family members who brought a civil case in court.
Sri Lanka’s former police, intelligence and defense chiefs were also held accountable and ordered to pay compensation to the victim’s relatives.
This is the first time a head of state in Sri Lanka has been held accountable for failing to prevent a terror attack.
Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church has regularly criticized the government’s investigation into the Easter Sunday bombings and has petitioned the UN for an international investigation.
A local jihadist group was blamed for the attack but authorities failed to identify the mastermind.
Sri Lanka has suffered through countless hijackings, bomb blasts and civilian massacres during its decades-long civil war.
The conflict ended when government forces crushed the separatist Tamil Tiger guerrillas in an unrestricted offensive in 2009 that left up to 40,000 civilians dead in the final weeks of the campaign.