By Dr. Sanjana Hattotuwa

This brief report investigates the relationship between a court order issued on 3 June, when Colombo Fort Magistrate Pasan Amarasekara imposed an overseas travel ban on former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and two military personnel in connection with the Easter Sunday attacks investigation, and a pronounced rise in Facebook content framing Suresh Sallay, Sri Lanka’s former intelligence chief. Exactly a week after the court order, on 10 June, Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala told Parliament that Sallay had directed the 2019 attack network killing nearly 300 people. This was the first official statement linking him directly to the horrific bombings.

Political context, and background is essential to read the content, and commentary on Facebook framing Sallay since 3 June. The Easter Sunday attacks preceded, and by most accounts enabled, Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s election to the presidency in November 2019 on a platform of national security raised to a fever pitch.

Allegations that he, or elements of military intelligence connected to him, had foreknowledge of or a hand in the attacks have circulated for years – raised by the Catholic Church, by the UK Channel 4’s reporting, and by successive domestic investigations, though never established in court. The 3 June travel ban was significant because is constituted the first visible judicial extension of the Easter attacks investigation towards the former President, and in doing so connected three elements – the attacks, Gotabaya, and Sallay – that defenders of the Rajapaksa-era security establishment (going back to Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency, when Gotabaya was a consequential Defence Secretary) have laboured to keep apart.

Sourced from Meta’s Content Library tool, this study is based on 7,695 Facebook posts on public accounts (institutional, and individual) created between 12 May and 10 June 2026. These posts were published by 1,233 unique accounts that included pages, groups, and personal profiles. Sinhala content, unsurprisingly, dominates: 6,737 posts were in Sinhala, 270 in English, and 67 in Tamil. Pages accounted for 5,430 posts, and individual profiles for 2,265, with 1,631 posts circulating in groups. The search term used to harvest the content included two variations of Sallay’s surname (Sallay, and Salley), as well as “සුරේෂ් සලේ” in Sinhala.

Before the travel ban on Gotabaya, there were around 36 posts a day naming Sallay, Gotabaya, and the Easter attacks. From the moment of the magistrate’s order until 10 June, the rate rises to around 827 posts per day or around 23 times rate previously. After Wijepala’s parliamentary statement, the rate climbs again to around 1,112 posts a day, roughly 31 times the baseline. These figures establish a very large temporal association between court’s ruling on 3 June mentioning Gotabaya, and the discursive surge around Sallay.

That said, the post distribution pattern points to lag rather than immediate response – which can be read as political networks assessing fallout, and exposure, and only then deciding to launch online, and offline campaigns supportive of Sallay, which by proxy addresses the reputational impact on the Rajapaksas (that for Namal’s appeal remains a core concern, unlike for his Uncle, and father, who have retired from active politics). The travel-ban day produced 224 posts – a clear elevation, but not an explosion. June 4 recorded 185 posts and June 5 recorded 206. June 6 reached 319. After this, the growth was considerable: 1,174 posts on 7 June, 1,886 on 8 June, 1,402 on 9 June, and 1,384 on 10 June.

In one reading, this suggests that the travel ban did not itself mobilise the discourse but supplied a Gotabaya-facing legal hook – the moment the investigation visibly reached towards the former President – which made the defence of Sallay urgent for actors who read the case as a threat to the wider Rajapaksa narrative. The mobilisation proper appears to have required additional triggers, which the week supplied through news reports: claims about Sallay’s health and treatment in custody, opposition political entrepreneurship, religious ritual, and street protest.

The narratives, and framing also evolved over this time. On 3 June, the highest-engagement material is legal in character: the travel ban itself, the CID’s claims about Sallay, and the prospect of the investigation reaching Gotabaya, alongside one widely engaged Sinhala post reporting that Sallay’s lawyers had told court he faced a suicide risk – the first strong custody-related framing. On 4 and 5 June the emotional register turns affective. The most consequential copied Sinhala text from this period describes Sallay as a non-Sinhala war hero, a symbol of the war’s legitimacy, and a man whom patriotic citizens must defend in a difficult hour; a page named Save Mother Lanka posted that text 65 times in under a day, and pushed a companion narrative – that linking Gotabaya and military intelligence to the Easter attacks rests on anti-Gotabaya political hostility rather than evidence – a further 68 times across two days. This specific frame is an interesting one to decode, because they communicate Sallay’s innocence, and simultaneously recast (any, and all) legal scrutiny as ingratitude towards those who defeated the LTTE. The narrative strategically, and tellingly converts a criminal investigation into a loyalty test directed at the military, the nation, and a Sinhala-Buddhist security imaginary within which an intelligence officer stands beyond the reach of a magistrate.

June 6 added Sallay’s treatment-in-custody frame: hunger-strike claims, allegations of cruel or inhumane treatment, inadequate food, and severe psychological distress. Some of this material carries genuine concern which many activists have articulated on social media posts outside the scope of this study: major concern, and condemnation that the state which continues to use the Prevention of Terrorism Act (despite an election promise to repeal it), detention orders, and coercive conditions to punish a suspect before trial. However, the trajectory of the seemingly rights-based framing in the Facebook posts studied is revealing. Posts repeatedly open with due process only to frame counter-accusations – conspiratorial claims about Shani Abeysekara, Dileepa Peiris, the Catholic Church, UK’s Channel 4, the NPP, the JVP, and the Tamil diaspora. The appropriation of rights discourse, and claims functions as a vehicle for impunity rather than a constraint upon it.

By 7 June the discourse turned into, and championed offline mobilisation. Wimal Weerawansa’s post praising Sallay as a wartime intelligence figure drew 37,653 engagements. Sarvajana Balaya announced an afternoon event, and Udaya Gammanpila called supporters to Fort. By 8 June, posts advertised and reported a satyagraha near Colombo Fort railway station, bodhi poojas, monks in attendance, and opposition leaders speaking; the largest pro-Sallay post of the day, from ‘පොහොට්ටුව ඩොට්කොම්’, announced that war heroes had gone before the CID for Sallay. This post generated 39,905 engagements. At this point the posts to Facebook cease to resemble an organic, if not partisan reaction to a legal development, and instead begins to resemble a concerted, coordinated public campaign with offline anchors.

To wit, on 9 June, Namal Rajapaksa posted to Facebook that he had attended the satyagraha for Sallay, condemning what he termed “the arbitrary rule of the current government, which is turning law into lawlessness”. A video of his fuller statement, published on YouTube, compresses the campaign’s entire discursive architecture into under two minutes. War heroes, he argues, are being hunted in a planned manner; the government has directed the police to political ends, eroding public respect for the police and confidence in the judiciary and the law; Sallay is held not by judicial determination but by presidential will. Namal Rajapaksa’s statement opens in the rights, and due-process register – around conducting the investigations – before pivoting to counter-accusation, demanding to know who placed Ibrahim on the JVP’s national list and who provided Zahran’s lawyer, and warning the government not to seize “this war hero” over its problem with Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa. This intervention matters because it renders explicit what the Facebook posts implied: the defence of Sallay and the defence of the Rajapaksas constitute a single political project, articulated at the protest itself by the dynasty’s heir, with heroisation, rights language, and conspiratorial counter-accusation braided into one statement.

However, June 9 and 10 posts also show counter-mobilisation: posts mocking the satyagraha, attacking Sallay’s defenders, carrying ministerial statements, and claiming the investigation would reach above Sallay to the real mastermind. One cluster, spreading across nine accounts, offers a self-conscious diagnosis of the campaign while it unfolds – the travel ban doubled the panic, it argues, and the fake accounts, bodhi poojas, and media appearances for Sallay followed.

All this said, the engagement data (i.e., reactions, shares, and comments) prevents a reading of this material in favour of Sallay (and the Rajapaksas) as being overwhelmingly positively accepted by those on Facebook. The posts collectively generated 3,224,882 reactions, 620,087 comments, and 424,522 shares. Laughing emojis (Ha ha) as reactions account for around 48% of the total, marginally exceeding likes at 46%, while love reactions were only 4%.

In this capture of posts, laughter frequently functions as ridicule, rejection, informal voting, or ironic contempt: one high-engagement post explicitly codes the heart as standing with Sallay and the laugh as refusing to, while another mocks “Sallay’s mother, Mrs Sallay” beneath repeated laughing emojis. There are at least four overlapping frames in the posts – heroisation of Sallay, due-process defence, accusatory claims that he or those above him directed the attacks, and sarcastic attacks on his defenders. Sinhala humour, irony, sarcasm, and idiom drive much of the engagement, which must not be mistaken for a wave of sympathy – which is to say, the public reaction to the posts indicates the scepticism or even the rejection of the narratives projected.

There appears to be some evidence of coordinated inauthentic behaviour because of the exact duplication of posts: 3,236 posts, or around 42% of the total feature repeated exact-text clusters, and 1,539 posts appear in clusters spanning multiple owners. Some of this reflects ordinary news syndication. Some does not. The clearest campaign-like artefact is a mobilisation message – gather near Colombo Fort railway station for Major General Suresh Sallay, war hero, under hashtags for protecting war heroes and the motherland – appearing 13 times across five owners within a two-minute window on the morning of 9 June. A long heroic text about the Sallay family’s Malay identity and military sacrifice appears 13 times across four owners on 8 June. Individual accounts behave in very suspicious ways: one profile produced 87 near-identical posts within a five-minute burst, and Save Mother Lanka produced 48 copies of a single text in another. This isn’t to say all the posts were somehow coordinated by the SLPP, and by networks partial to Sallay, and the Rajapaksas. There’s significant variation in the posts, underscoring the fact that a varied constellation of accounts participated in the discourse around Sallay – with only some of them acting in a highly coordinated manner.

The travel ban on Gotabaya, given the study of this material, acted as a catalytic legal event. The question of who enabled the 2019 Easter attacks and the question of who benefited from them politically have run on separate tracks for years – vital for the Rajapaksa political narrative, legacy, and future electoral prospects for the SLPP writ large, and Namal Rajapaksa in particular. The magistrate’s order fused them. Once the investigation visibly reached the former President, defending Sallay ceased to be about Sallay alone; it became a proxy defence of the war victory, of military intelligence, and of the security establishment’s effective exemption from the law – a fusion Namal Rajapaksa’s presence at, and speech from the satyagraha rendered unmistakable. The campaign that followed reached for the most powerful, populist emotional registers available in the post-war Sinhala-Buddhist identity register – the wounded war hero, the hunger strike, the bodhi pooja, the monk at the railway station.

There’s a broader point around narrative asymmetry that’s important to end with. A criminal investigation into the murder of hundreds of people should proceed through evidence, judicial process, and institutional accountability. The Facebook posts record the speed and skill with which a court-linked development can be converted into a loyalty and political litmus test – for or against the ranaviru, the Rajapaksas, the Church, the government. By the time Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala spoke in Parliament, a substantial audience had already been primed to hear whatever he had to say, and however he said it, as persecution. Many of the posts launder impunity through the language of rights, due process, judicial independence, patriotism, religious grievance, and ethnic security. These two registers are deliberately braided, and by architects of political communication who know what they are doing. These posts, in the period studied, indicate how quickly the emotional terrain around a key suspect in the Easter Sunday terrorism can be re-engineered to pre-empt accountability. It is a harbinger of what to expect if, and when in the future the investigations involve Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

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