Sri Lanka: At least 158 killed, hundreds injured in Easter bombings

At least 158 people were killed and hundreds more
were injured in a series of bombing attacks on several churches, hotels and a
zoo in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, officials said.
The blasts hit three high-end hotels and one church
in the capital, Colombo, while two additional churches were targeted elsewhere
in the country during Easter services, Sri Lankan police said.
The sites were all heavily frequented by tourists,
and at least 35 foreign nationals were killed in the explosions, police told
AFP. A hospital source said Americans, British and Dutch citizens were among
the dead.
Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe
called the blasts “cowardly” and said the government was working to “contain
the situation.”
“I call upon all Sri Lankans during this tragic time
to remain united and strong,” he wrote in a tweet.
Local security officials said at least two of the
attacks appeared to have been carried out by suicide bombers.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry said it was not aware of
any Israeli victims in the attacks, but was still looking into the matter.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for
the apparent coordinated attack.
Sri Lanka’s police chief made a nationwide alert 10
days before Sunday’s bomb attacks in the country that suicide bombers planned
to target “prominent churches,” according to the warning seen by AFP.
“A foreign intelligence agency has reported that the
NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama’ath) is planning to carry out suicide attacks
targeting prominent churches as well as the Indian high commission in Colombo,”
said the alert, which was sent by police chief Pujuth Jayasundara to top
officers.
The NTJ is a radical Muslim group in Sri Lanka that
came to notice last year when it was linked to the vandalization of Buddhist
statues.
According to hospital officials, at least 40 people
were killed in the Colombo attacks; at least 62 were killed in Negombo, north
of the capital; and at least 27 were killed in Batticalao, on the country’s
eastern coast.
The first blast ripped through St. Anthony’s Shrine
in Colombo.
Alex Agileson, who was in the vicinity, said
buildings in the surrounding area shook with the blast.
At least 160 people injured in the St. Anthony’s
blast had been admitted to the Colombo National Hospital by mid-morning, an
official told AFP.
Another explosion was reported at St. Sebastian’s
Church in Negombo, a Catholic-majority town north of Colombo. The church
appealed for help on its Facebook page, and posted graphic photographs and
videos from the scene.
“A bomb attack to our church, please come and help
if your family members are there,” the church wrote.
Photos from the St. Sebastian’s Church circulating
on social media showed the roof had been almost blown off in the blast. The
floor was littered with a mixture of roof tiles, splintered wood and blood.
Several people could be seen covered in blood, with
some trying to help those with more serious injuries.
A church in the town of Batticalao, in the east of
the country, was also targeted in the attack, police said.
An official at the Batticaloa hospital told AFP more
than 300 people had been admitted to hospitals with injuries following the
blast there.
At least one of the victims was killed in Colombo’s
Cinnamon Grand Hotel, near the prime minister’s official residence, where the
blast ripped through a restaurant, a hotel official told AFP.
The island nation of Sri Lanka, just off the coast
from India, endured a brutal and bloody civil war from 1983 to 2009, when the
government declared victory over the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam insurgent
group, also known as the Tamil Tigers.
Only around six percent of mainly Buddhist Sri Lanka
is Catholic, but the religion is seen as a unifying force because it includes
people from both the Tamil and majority Sinhalese ethnic groups.