SRI LANKA’S government said today that it will appoint a parliamentary committee to investigate allegations that Sri Lankan intelligence had complicity in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings that killed 269 people.

The country’s Labour Minister Manusha Nanayakkara told Parliament that details of the investigation into allegations made in a series of videos on the country’s Channel 4 released on Tuesday will be announced soon.

A man interviewed in the videos said that he arranged a meeting between a local Islamic State-inspired group and a top state intelligence official to hatch a plot to create insecurity in Sri Lanka and enable Gotabaya Rajapaksa to win the presidential election later that year.

Azad Maulana was a spokesman for a breakaway group of the Tamil Tiger rebels that later became a pro-state militia and helped the government defeat the rebels and win Sri Lanka’s long civil war in 2009.

Mr Rajapaksa was a top defence official during the war, and his older brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had been defeated in the 2015 elections after 10 years in power.

A group of Sri Lankans inspired by the Islamic State group carried out the six near-simultaneous suicide bombings in churches and tourist hotels on April 21 2019.

The attacks killed 269 people, including worshippers at Easter Sunday services, locals and foreign tourists, and revived memories of frequent bombings during the quarter-century war.

Fears over national security enabled Mr Rajapaksa to sweep to power but he was forced to resign last year after mass protests over the country’s worst economic crisis.

In the Channel 4 programme, Mr Maulana said that he arranged a meeting in 2018 between Isis-inspired extremists and a top intelligence officer at the behest of his boss at the time, Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, the leader of the rebel splinter group-turned-political party.

Neither Mr Chandrakanthan nor Mr Rajapaksa has commented on the claims.