'MASTERMIND' THEORY OF EASTER ATTACKS NOT VALID ANYMORE

THE TRUE CULPRITS ARE SYSTEMIC FAILURES. WEAK POLITICAL LEADERSHIP, DYSFUNCTIONAL INTELLIGENCE COORDINATION, AND COMPLACENCY IN THE FACE OF RADICALIZATION

- By Major (Retd) Hemantha Dayaratne USP

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Why the mastermind model is obsolete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 But in today's world, the "mastermind" model has become outdated.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.