Bombs and conspiracism

Police investigations into the recent detection of a grenade at All Saints Church, Colombo 08, has taken a dramatic turn with the arrest of a retired doctor from Piliyandala, on suspicion. A suspect previously taken into custody is reported to have told the police that he planted the bomb at the church on the doctor’s instructions. The family members of the doctor have vehemently denied the allegation. The incident and the manner in which the police are conducting investigations have given rise to a host of conspiracy theories.

Hardly a day passes in this country without a conspiracy theory being concocted on something or the other.

Sri Lankans still have doubts and suspicions about various crimes committed decades ago. Two newspapers have recently carried a series of articles on the assassination of Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike (1959), and raised the question whether Somarama, the person who was sentenced to death for the killing, was the real assassin.

Many people do not believe it was the LTTE that assassinated Lalith Athulathmudali and President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.

Global situation

Conspiracy theories however are not confined to this country alone; it is a global phenomenon. Americans believe that President John F. Kennedy’s assassin was not actually Lee Harvey Oswald, and the bullet that killed JFK came from someone else’s gun.

There are many theories about the massacre of the Nepalese royal family in 2001. Nine members of King Birendra’s family were shot dead, and nobody seems to know who masterminded the crime.

It is not only crimes that have made conspiracy theorists’ imagination run riot; there is a school of thought, which says the 1969 moon landing was fake. Many Americans believe that aliens are being secretly harbored in Area 51.

Conspiracy theorists have succeeded in having the world believe that SARS-Cov-2 virus, which causes Covid-19, was created in a laboratory, and a US billionaire had a hand in its creation and transmission. Some of them went to the extent of claiming that 5G towers, of all things, contributed to the transmission of the coronavirus although no sensible person believed them!

Anti-vaxxers have used conspiracy theories to discourage many people from being inoculated against Covid-19, and they are responsible for vaccine hesitancy, which has impeded the Sri Lankan health officials’ efforts to administer the third booster shot to ward off a possible Omicron wave.

The Internet has stood the conspiracy theorists in good stead. Unlike in the past, the sky’s the limit for them, now.

“We are all natural-born conspiracy theorists,” Dr. Robert Brotherton, an academic psychologist at the Barnard College of the Columbia University, USA, has said of humans and their proclivities, in his seminal book, ‘Suspicious Minds: Why we believe conspiracy theories’:  “Conspiracy theories resonate with some our brain’s built-in biases and shortcuts, and tap into some of our deepest desires, fears, and assumptions about the world and the people in it.”

Church bomb and police

The police lost no time in arresting a church worker over the All Saints Church incident; he has since been remanded. They have said the suspect placed the bomb and then informed a priest of it. The suspect involved a 13-year-old boy in planting the bomb, according to investigators.

But Archbishop of Colombo Malcolm Cardinal Ranjith and other Catholic priests are convinced otherwise. They say the police were in a mighty hurry to arrest the church employee after examining only part of the CCTV footage made available by the church.

The rest of the footage released to the media by the church shows a man entering the church carrying a sili-sili bag, spending some time there and leaving in a hurry after placing something on the floor near a table. The Catholic priests have demanded to know why he has not been arrested; they have thus cast doubt on the Police Spokesman’s version of the incident.

Public Security Minister Sarath Weerasekera has insisted that the police have arrested the person who placed the bomb, and the suspect has made a confession. He has drawn parallels between the All Saints Church incident and the detection of a grenade at Lanka Hospital in September 2021. He suspects a conspiracy against the government. The church leaders also see the planting of the grenade at the Borella church as part of a conspiracy against the Catholic community.

Easter Sunday bombings and conspiracy theories

Conspiracy theories abound about the Easter Sunday terrorist attacks. It has been claimed in some quarters that there was a foreign hand behind them.

The Archbishop of Colombo has claimed that the Easter Sunday bombings could not be blamed entirely on Islamic terrorists He has stopped short of naming others who he thinks were responsible for them. He has left that to the imagination of the public. He said so speaking at a recent religious ceremony held 1,000 days after the Easter Sunday tragedy.

Among those who believe there was a foreign conspiracy behind the Easter Sunday attacks are some prominent persons, who testified before the Presidential Commission of Inquiry (PCoI), which probed the tragedy. According to the commission report, they are Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, former President Maithripala Sirisena, SLMC leader and former Minister Rauff Hakeem, leader of All Ceylon Makkal Congress, former Minister and current SJB MP Rishad Bathiudeen, former Western Province Governor Asath Salley, SJB MP Mujeebur Rahuman, former Director of State Intelligence Service SDIG Nilantha Jayawardena, former Commandant of the STF SDIG (retd.) M. R. Latiff, former Chief of Defense Staff and Navy Commander Vice Admiral (retd.) Ravindra Wijegunaratne, SDIG (retd.) Ravi Seneviratne and former CID Director Shani Abeysekera.

The PCoI, however, did not pay much attention to the possibility of foreign involvement in the Easter Sunday attacks. It has said in its final report that none of the above-mentioned persons provided any evidence to assist it in inquiring into this particular aspect of the carnage other than ipse dixits or unproven claims.

However, something that the then Director of the State Intelligence Service SDIG Jayawardena made in his testimony is of interest. The report says, [Jayawardena] is the only witness to have testified impliedly about the identity of a possible foreign involvement [sic]. He testified that an Indian named Abu Hind was a possible foreign participant who may have triggered the attack. He went on to imply that the intelligence agencies that provided him with the intelligence on 4^th, 20^th and 21 t April 2019 may have had a hand in the attack.”

Curiously, the Easter Sunday attacks have not been probed from this angle despite a PCoI recommendation to that effect.

Search for the mastermind

The Catholic church has been demanding that the mastermind of the Easter Sunday killings be traced, implying that the investigations are not complete, and the threat is not over. The Cardinal has been campaigning very hard to have this aspect of the carnage probed, but in vain. The police would have the public believe that Naufer Moulavi masterminded the attacks.

Minister of Public Security, Dr. Sarath Weerasekera told the media on 06 April 2021 that the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday attacks was Naufer Moulavi, the mentor of NTJ (National Thowheed Jamaath) leader Zahran Hashim, who himself carried out a suicide attack at Shangri-La hotel on 21 April 2019. The minister said so when a journalist asked him whether there had been a foreign hand behind the attacks. Former Jamaat-e-Islami leader, Rasheed Hajjul Akbar, too, had played a leading role in the terror strikes, the Minister said, briefing the press on the future of the report on the PCoI on the Easter carnage.

Probing terror attacks is no easy task, given their sheer their complexity and difficulties in ascertaining evidence, making arrests, substantiating allegations and building strong cases against the suspects taken into custody. Investigations therefore tend to drag for years, but they must be conducted expeditiously in a transparent and credible manner to the satisfaction of the families of victims and the general public if their faith in the police and other agencies conducting probes is not to erode. Unfortunately, the investigations into the Easter Sunday terrorist bombings have got politicised to a considerable extent thanks to political statements some government politicians make on them from time to time, and the fact that the PCoI recommendations have not been fully implemented.

New dimension

The All Saints Church grenade incident has added a new dimension to the problem of threats to the in general and Catholic shrines in particular.

The incumbent government came to power by campaigning on a national security platform a few months after the Easter Sunday attacks. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa himself admitted this in his policy statement at the inauguration of the current parliamentary session, on Tuesday (18). He said the key issue troubling the public at the time of the last presidential election was threats to national security, and his government had ensured that the country was free from terrorism today. But the All Saints Church incident has had an unsettling effect on all Sri Lankans, for it has revealed that public places are still vulnerable despite the government’s assurances.

Psychologists inform us that conspiracy theories basically emanate from negative feelings such as paranoia, anxiety and alienation, and a sense of loss of control. Thus, the task before the government is to take steps to expedite the ongoing probes into the Easter Sunday attacks and the incidents such as the detection of grenade inside All Saints Church, have the perpetrators tried and punished, and thereby rid society of paranoia, anxiety and alienation because these negative feelings, if left unattended over a long period of time, take a corrosive effect on public trust in the rule of law, democracy and the state itself.