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Citing a source, the agency said that it was Ilham Ahmed Ibrahim, the younger of the two brothers, who detonated a bomb, taking his own life as well as those of his children and his alleged spouse.

The blast occurred on empty land behind the magistrate court in the town of Pugoda, 40km east of Colombo. Police say the explosion was not controlled like several blasts in recent days, when police blew up suspicious objects.

Officials also temporarily closed the road to Colombo international airport and canceled outgoing flights after a suspicious vehicle was stopped at the entrance to the airport car park on Thursday morning. Services, however, quickly returned to normal as the concern proved to be a false alarm.

Local reports say police were responding to a tip-off when they found the 26-year-old carrying several parliamentary passes and a rough map marking out the road route to the parliament. They also found a vehicle which was possibly modified to carry a bomb, although no explosives have been found.

A canine unit was deployed to search for explosives but found nothing. Police recovered a tablet device, three mobile phones, a dozen SIM cards, T-56 assault rifle ammunition, and several credit cards during the raid.
...
The as yet unnamed 26-year-old suspect is due in court Thursday. Overall, the number of people arrested in connection with the attacks has risen to over 100, and eight of the nine suicide bombers have been named so far.

Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena asked his defense minister and chief of police to resign Wednesday.

Sri Lankan police arrested a further three people, seizing 21 grenades and six swords during a raid in Colombo, though authorities did not specify whether the raids were directly related to the Easter Sunday bombing investigation.

Police forces from at least six countries are assisting Sri Lankan authorities with their investigations, including Scotland Yard, the FBI, the New Zealand Police, the Australian Federal Police, Danish and Dutch police, and Interpol.

It has also emerged that one of the suicide bombers, Ilham Ahmed Ibrahim, the son of a billionaire spice tycoon, was previously arrested and subsequently released by police.

"It was the suicide bomber of the Cinnamon Grand bomb attack who was released earlier," Sri Lankan government spokesman Sudarshana Gunawardana said. Ibrahim's father, Mohamed Yusuf Ibrahim, has been arrested on suspicion of aiding and abetting his sons.

The first alert was on April 4, and it came from investigations by Indian agencies that followed after the National Investigation Agency (NIA), in December 2018, stumbled upon the videos of National Thowheed Jama'at (NTJ) leader Maulvi Zahran Bin Hashim while probing the Islamic State (IS) Coimbatore module.

In the first alert, the agencies told Sri Lanka that, apart from churches, the Indian High Commission in Colombo could be a target. The second alert was sent a day before the attack and was even more specific than the first one in that it mentioned the possible targets, the officials said.

The last alert was sent hours before the suicide bombers attacked the three churches and four hotels.

"The information about the attacks were a result of detailed analysis of information gathered through technical means and human sources," one of the officials said. Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe acknowledged that alerts had been sent by India.

"India gave us the intelligence but there has been a lapse on how we acted on that... intelligence was not conveyed down the line," Wickremesinghe told NDTV in an exclusive interview.

HT spoke to multiple officials in the central intelligence agencies who confirmed that the videos of Hashim, in which he exhorted Muslim youth from Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala to establish an Islamic rule in the region, were analysed in detail and investigated further by India's external spy agency R&AW (Research and Analysis Wing). The videos were stored in the pen drives, memory cards, mobile phones and CDs/DVDs, recovered by NIA on December 19, 2018 during raids at Kuniyamuthur, Ukkadam, Otteri in Chennai, Tindivanam near Villupuram, and Variety Hall Road in Coimbatore, from the premises of six ISIS suspects, Mohammed Ashiq A, Ismail S, Samsudeen, Mohammed Salauddin S, Jafar Shadik Ali and Shahul Hameed.

The six IS members were arrested on September 1, 2018 for planning to attack Hindu leaders/activists in Coimbatore.

The Coimbatore module members, a second intelligence official said, also regularly listened to Hashim's speeches. All six have already been charged by NIA.

"Hashim's video, which appeared to be the latest, showed he was aggressive and he repeatedly assured the cadres that something big would happen soon to teach a lesson [to the members of communities which do not follow the Sharia]," said the officer quoted above.

Further investigation also revealed that some of the Coimbatore module members were in touch with some Sri Lankans, who also followed Hashim.

"Bin Hashim had a major role in radicalising these youngsters on both sides [India and Sri Lanka] to be part of Islamic State," said the second official who added that the Coimbatore module had no idea of what was being planned in Sri Lanka.

Indian agencies subsequently discovered Hashim's mobile numbers as well and found that Hashim was in touch with some IS functionaries in neighbouring Bangladesh. A senior government official who did not wish to be named said that Bangladesh too needs to be on the alert.

Based on the analysis by NIA and further information gathered done by the Intelligence Bureau and R&AW, a communication was sent to Sri Lanka about the possible attacks.

The Sri Lankan authorities evidently took the information lightly, and, in turn, sent out a nationwide alert only on April 11.

Preliminary investigations have revealed that Hashim blew himself up at Shangri-La hotel in Colombo on Sunday.

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The one thing that the New Zealand and Sri Lankan terrorist attacks have in common other than the large number of worshipping civilians that were killed is that the perpetrators tried way too hard to have their attacks spark a "Clash of Civilizations" between Christianity and Islam. The Australian terrorist responsible for the New Zealand attacks scrawled the names of famous Balkan figures and battles associated with the wars against the Ottoman Empire onto his guns and gear before gunning down dozens of Muslims, while the Sri Lankan terrorist network specifically targeted Christians and luxury hotels during Easter in order to get the majority-Christian West's attention. Both series of terrorist attacks were deadly provocations meant to incite Christian-Islamic animosity and advance the "Clash of Civilizations" blueprint for dividing and ruling the Eastern Hemisphere in the 21st century.

Rural India is plagued by farmer suicides, child malnourishment, growing unemployment, increased informalisation, indebtedness and an overall collapse of agriculture. Those involved in farming and related activities are being driven to migrate to cities to become cycle rickshaw drivers, domestic servants, daily wage labourers and suchlike.

Hundreds of thousands of farmers in India have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GM) cash crops and economic liberalisation. According to this report, the number of cultivators in India declined from 166 million to 146 million between 2004 and 2011. Some 6,700 left farming each day. Between 2015 and 2022 the number of cultivators is likely to decrease to around 127 million.

[..]

From the geopolitical lending strategies of institutions like the World Bank to the opening up of food and agriculture to foreign corporations via WTO rules and the US-India Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, there is an ongoing strategy to displace the existing system of smallholder cultivation and village-based food production with one suited to the interests of global seed, pesticide, food processing and retail corporations like Monsanto-Bayer, Cargill and Walmart.

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