• PM says attacks could hit economic growth, tourism
• Colombo Crimes Division arrests 13 suspects; 10 handed over to CID for further questioning
Over the course of the day, a series of bombs exploded, including at churches and luxury hotels, killing around 290 people. It was the deadliest series of attacks the South Asian island country had seen since a bloody civil war there ended a decade ago.
The explosions — most of them in or around Colombo, the capital — collapsed ceilings and blew out windows, killing worshippers and hotel guests in one scene after another of smoke, soot, blood, broken glass, screams and wailing alarms. Victims were carried out of blood-spattered pews.
Most of those killed were Sri Lankans. But the three bombed hotels and one of the churches, St. Anthony’s Shrine, were frequented by foreign tourists, and Sri Lanka’s Foreign Ministry said the bodies of at least 27 foreign visitors from a variety of countries were recovered.
The U.S. said “several” American were among the dead, while Britain and China said they, too, lost citizens.
Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said he feared the massacre could trigger instability in Sri Lanka, a country of about 21 million people, and vowed to “vest all necessary powers with the defense forces” to take action against those responsible.
A woman is tears after a deadly bomb blast at St.Anthony's Shrine in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo on Sunday
The government imposed a nationwide curfew from 6pm to 6am and blocked Facebook and other social media, saying it needed to curtail the spread of false information and ease tension.
Soldiers secure the area around St.Anthony's Shrine
The Archbishop of Colombo, Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, called on Sri Lanka’s government to “mercilessly” punish those responsible “because only animals can behave like that.”
The scale of the bloodshed recalled the worst days of Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, in which the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group from the ethnic Tamil minority, sought independence from the Buddhist-majority country. During the war, the Tigers and other rebels carried out a multitude of bombings. The Tamils are Hindu, Muslim and Christian.
Sri Lanka, situated off the southern tip of India, is about 70 percent Buddhist, with the rest of the population Muslim, Hindu or Christian. While there have been scattered incidents of anti-Christian harassment in recent years, there has been nothing on the scale of what happened Sunday.
Sri Lankan police stand at the site of the explosion in a restaurant area of the luxury Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo
Six nearly simultaneous blasts took place in the morning in Colombo at St. Anthony’s Shrine — a Catholic church — and the Cinnamon Grand, Shangri-La and Kingsbury hotels. After a lull of a few hours, two more explosions occurred at St. Sebastian Catholic church in Negombo, a mostly Catholic town north of Colombo, and at the Protestant Zion church in the eastern town of Batticaloa.
A woman is helped near St. Anthony's Shrine, the site of one of multiple explosions in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday
Three police officers were killed while conducting a search at a suspected safe house in Dematagoda, on the outskirts of Colombo, when its occupants apparently detonated explosives to prevent arrest, Wijewardena said.
Local TV showed the Shangri-La’s second-floor restaurant was gutted, with the ceiling and windows blown out. Loose wires hung and tables were overturned in the blackened space. From outside the police cordon, three bodies could be seen covered in white sheets.