Sri Lanka warns of more suicide bombers as police scour capital

Hundreds of police officers swept through Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Thursday, shutting down large parts of the capital city and looking urgently for six suspects — three men and three women — who they said might be suicide bombers planning to follow the Easter Sunday attacks with a new wave of bloodshed.

The country’s defence secretary, Hemasiri Fernando, resigned after the president blamed him for failing to act on detailed warnings that Sri Lanka had received in the days before suicide bombers killed more than 350 people at churches holding Easter services and luxury hotels that were popular with foreign tourists.

Sri Lanka’s police said they had information that another attack was imminent. They posted the suspects’ pictures on social media and urged the public to call a police hotline.

A priest officiates at a mass burial near St. Sebastian's Church in Negombo, Sri Lanka, on Wednesday, April 24, 2019. Nine suicide bombers from mostly educated, middle-class backgrounds carried out the attacks in Sri Lanka that killed more than 350 people on Easter Sunday, the authorities said on Wednesday as they warned of an ongoing terrorist threat and continued making arrests. (Adam Dean/The New York Times)

Security services also circulated a memo saying that the group that carried out the Easter attacks could be “specifically targeting Sufi shrines.”

The authorities in Sri Lanka have blamed a local extremist Islamist group, National Towheed Jamaat, for the bombings, and images posted online appear to show members of the group pledging allegiance to the Islamic State group, which has claimed responsibility for the attacks. The local group follows a fundamentalist form of Islam that believes Sufi Muslims, who adhere to a mystical school of Islam, are heretics.

The tragedy Sunday could have been much worse had it not been for a miscalculation by the attackers, officials said. One bomber arrived at the Taj Samudra, another luxury hotel, carrying explosives in a large backpack, but twice failed to trigger the fuse on the device.

The bomber then left the hotel for a motel a couple miles away, where he died in an explosion. Officials say he was probably trying to fix the bomb when it detonated.

Across Sri Lanka, Friday prayer for Muslims and Sunday services for Roman Catholics have been cancelled amid fears that the bombings might have marked the start of a new era of sectarian violence. There has already been some violent backlash against the country’s Muslim minority.

Agents from the FBI, the British intelligence service MI6, and Indian, Australian and Swiss security agencies have all joined the investigation into the attacks. Sri Lankan authorities said more than 70 people had been arrested.

© 2019 New York Times News Service