Investigators are looking at whether the National Thowheeth Jama'ath (NTJ) group had ‘international support’ for the deadly Easter Sunday attacks on churches and luxury hotels.
COLOMBO - Sri Lanka said Monday it believed a local Islamist extremist group was behind deadly suicide bomb blasts that killed nearly 300 people as it announced a national state of emergency beginning midnight.
More than 500 people were injured in the assault that saw suicide bombers hit three high-end hotels popular with foreign tourists, and three churches, unleashing carnage in Colombo and beyond.As tension remained high, police on Monday said they had found 87 bomb detonators - 12 of them scattered on the ground at a bus station and another 75 in a nearby garbage dump.
The attacks were the worst ever carried out against Sri Lanka's small Christian minority, who make up just seven percent of the 21 million population. Dozens of people were killed at the church, including friends of 16-year-old Primasha Fernando, who was at her home nearby when the suicide bomber struck."I saw bodies everywhere," she added in tears. "I saw parents carrying their dead babies. I saw dead people who had hair but didn't have faces anymore."
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