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Six explosions rocked Catholic churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka as Christians began Easter Sunday celebrations, with at least 50 killed and hundreds injured, local authorities confirmed.
The blasts occurred at around 8:45am local time at St. Anthony's Church in Colombo and St. Sebastian's Church in Negombo, a Catholic-majority town outside of the capital. The Zion Church in Batticaloa on the eastern coast was also targeted.
At around the same time, the Shangri-La, Cinnamon Grand and Kingsbury five-star hotels were also hit, police confirmed. All attacks appear to have been coordinated.
At least 52 people were killed, media reported, citing police.
Comment: Update 16:00 CETThe latest figure is that
207 people were killed, and around 500 injured, from 8 blasts in different cities in Sri Lanka.That death toll is expected to rise...
At least 207 people were killed and hundreds more wounded in a series of bomb blasts that hit luxury hotels and churches across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, leaving the entire country in a state of lock-down.
The first wave of attacks struck at the heart of the country's minority Christian community during busy Easter services at churches in the cities of Colombo, Negombo and Batticaloa on Sunday morning. Additional blasts ripped through three high-end hotels, the Shangri La, Cinnamon Grand and Kingsbury, all in capital city Colombo.
Update 21:30 CETRT has more
details:
The churches are located in three locations on different sides of the island: St. Anthony's Church in its commercial capital Colombo and St. Sebastian's Church in Negombo on the western coast, and the Zion Church in Batticaloa in the east.
The explosions hit as Easter Sunday services were being held, with over 50 people killed in St. Sebastian's alone, according to a police official cited by Reuters. Over 25 people were reportedly killed in Batticaloa.
Hotels hit in Easter Sunday explosions in Sri Lanka
All three hotels are located in Colombo, one of them - Cinnamon Grand - about 200 meters from the prime minister's residence, and the other two not much further away.
Also, 10 days ago, Sri Lanka's national police chief reportedly
sent out an alert about a radical Islamist group planning bomb attacks on prominent churches in the country.
The alert was sent by Pujuth Jayasundara on April 11, according to AFP. The alert said:
"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..."
That's pretty much what just happened.
Which foreign intelligence agency, inquiring minds would like to know...
Here's footage of a bomb going off at a church in Colombo:
This was clearly a sophisticated multi-site, coordinated operation - the worst to hit the Indian subcontinent since 2008 in Mumbai. Police have
arrested 7 people suspected of involvement, during raids which cost three police lives.
Turkey's Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, has
compared the attacks to the recent shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand. He may not have had this in mind but the perpetrators (the handlers, not the hired guns) may have sought to provide a 'balancing counterweight' to the outrage at Muslims being killed during religious worship in mosques.
12 hours later,
no group has yet claimed responsibility, and there's no obvious suspect. There has been no violence in Sri Lanka since its civil war ended 10 years ago, so the country has had no flare-up of Random Muslim Violence thus far during the two decades of the 'War on Terror'. Which makes today's multi-site attacks all the more strange.
The manufactured 'clash of civilizations' continues...
Updates 22 April 2019Another bomb has been
found near Colombo airport. Police have defused it and the airport was put into lockdown.
And another one still was
found today in a van outside St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Colombo, scene of carnage yesterday. It apparently detonated as police prepared to defuse it:
Denmark's richest man has lost
3 of his 4 children to the explosion at one of the hotels hit during yesterday's mega-terror attack.
Police have reported finding
87 bomb detonators at the main bus station in Colombo. Clearly, whoever carried this out, had a LOT of financial backing in order to do so.
Meanwhile, questions are being asked about why this warning, issued 10 days before the attacks, failed to prevent them from happening:
The current
death toll has jumped to
290, with about 500 wounded. 32 of those are thought to be
foreigners, including American, British, Turkish, Indian, Chinese, Danish, Moroccan, Dutch, Pakistan and Portuguese nationals. A total of 24 suspects have been rounded up, and all of them are apparently Sri Lankan nationals.
However, the country's health minister
has said:
"We do not believe these attacks were carried out by a group of people who were confined to this country.
He also stated that
there was "an international network," without which the attacks "could not have succeeded."There have still been no claims of responsibility for the attacks...
The US State Department has
piped up to warn that the terrorists are planning further attacks in Sri Lanka. It provided no information about why it believes this to be the case, so we can only presume it's because the US government is in contact with the terrorists.
Here's an RT summary of the sites hit so far:
Comment: FINALLY!
Scenes from Kim's arrival in Russia: