Changes in security forces within 24 hours: MS

• In address to the nation, President says he will make top-level changes and restructure Police and military intelligence in a week

President Maithripala Sirisena yesterday said that he would speedily restructure the intelligence structure of the Sri Lankan security forces, with changes of top officials going into effect within the next 24 hours. 

Sirisena releasing a statement to the nation said that he was uninformed of the seriousness of the security threats and assured that he would have taken action if he had been updated. 

President  Maithripala Sirisena

The President said, given the seriousness of the lapses and their aftermath, he was forced to take strong steps that would include changes to the top leadership of the military, Police and Special Forces. 

However, he did not elaborate on what the specific changes would be but said they would go into implementation within the next 24 hours. He also said broader restructuring of the entire military and Police framework would be carried out in a week.

He also said that since the end of the war, over the last 10 years, Sri Lanka had grown its democratic credentials as a country that has been able to improve its rights and freedoms. The President said that it was extremely unfortunate that at the point when Sri Lanka was readying to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the end of the conflict, it was now faced with a brand new set of challenges.

“Since 2017 we have been aware of suspicious movement by certain individuals and groups, but there wasn’t sufficient evidence to take legal action against these people, therefore we continued to monitor them. There was little indication that this group would gain the capacity to carry out such large-scale and well-planned attacks that have affected every strata of our society and beyond. They gained these abilities in an extremely unexpected way,” he said.

The President also expressed his condolences to families who had loved ones killed or injured in the attacks. 

Recalling Sri Lanka’s long history of dealing with terrorists, the President called on the public not to deepen communal tensions and to understand that not all people belonging to one ethnicity had the same set of beliefs. 

“Not all Muslims are terrorists. It is just a tiny fraction of the community and they cannot be described as such. Initially people thought all Tamils must be LTTE sympathisers but over the years they came to realise that this was not so. We cannot become victims of this kind of thinking. We must stand together and work to keep the hard-won peace we have achieved.”