Sri Lanka's government on Wednesday acknowledged 'major' lapses over its failure to prevent the horrific Easter attacks that killed more than 350 people, despite prior intelligence warnings.
CNN reported that Indian intelligence services had passed on"unusually specific" information in the weeks before the attacks, some of it from an IS suspect in their custody.
"It was a major lapse in the sharing of information," deputy defence minister Ruwan Wijewardene conceded at a press conference on Wednesday.Chilling CCTV footage has emerged showing one of the attackers calmly patting a child on the head and shoulder moments before he walked into the packed St Sebastian's church and detonated his bomb among those attending Easter Mass, unleashing carnage.
Relatives mourn during the burial ceremony of a bomb blast victim at a cemetery in Colombo on April 24 2019, three days after a series of bomb blasts targeting churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka."The restructuring of the security forces and the police will be completed within a week," he said. "Most of them are well-educated and come from middle, upper-middle class families, so they are financially quite independent and their families are quite stable financially, that is a worrying factor in this," the minister added.
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