Foreign partners from the UK and Australia, as well as the FBI and US military, are helping the country’s investigations
Sri Lankan police at the site of an explosion at the luxury Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on April 21 2019. Picture: AFP/ISHARA S KODIKARAThe scale and sophistication of the Easter Sunday attacks on churches and hotels in Sri Lanka suggests the involvement of an external group such as Islamic State , the US ambassador said on Wednesday as the death toll jumped to 359.
“If you look at the scale of the attacks, the level of co-ordination, the sophistication of them, it’s not implausible to think there are foreign links,” the US ambassador to Sri Lanka, Alaina Teplitz, told reporters in Colombo. “Exploring potential linkage is going to be part of [investigations].” “It is a major lapse in the sharing of intelligence information,” Wijewardene told a separate news conference. “We have to take responsibility.”
He said information about possible suicide attacks was received from Indian intelligence on April 4 and a security council meeting was chaired by President Maithripala Sirisena three days later but it was not shared more widely. Sri Lanka’s 22-million people include minority Christians, Muslims and Hindus. Until now, Christians have largely managed to avoid the worst of the island’s conflict and communal tensions.IS said through its AMAQ news agency on Tuesday that the assaults were carried out by seven attackers. However, Wijewardene said there were in fact nine suicide bombers involved in the attacks on three churches and four hotels. Eight have been identified and one of them is a woman, he said.
The attacks have already foreshadowed a shake-up of Sri Lankan security forces, with Sirisena saying on Tuesday that he planned to change some of his defence chiefs after criticism that the intelligence warnings were ignored.
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