Violence returns to Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka’s government has blamed local jihadist group National Thowheed Jamath for one of Asia’s deadliest terrorist attacks in years and said other nations had shared intelligence ahead of the blasts. However, did the Sri Lankan government ignore intelligence reports about an impending attack?

Background

On 21 April 2019, Easter Sunday, three churches across Sri Lanka and three luxury hotels in the commercial capital Colombo were bombed. Later that day, there were smaller explosions at a housing complex and a guest house, killing two civilians and three police officers investigating the situation and raiding suspect locations. Several cities in Sri Lanka were targeted. At least 290 people were killed, including at least 35 foreign nationals and three police officers, and at least 500 were injured in the bombings.

The church bombings were carried out during Easter services in Negombo, Batticaloa and Colombo; the hotels bombed were the Shangri-La, Cinnamon Grand and Kingsbury hotels.

National Thowheeth Jama'ath is a Sri Lankan Islamist jihadist group. The group promotes Islamist terrorist ideology. The director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism said that it "aims to spread the global jihadist movement to Sri Lanka and to create hatred, fear and divisions in society." NTJ's leadership had been condemned by several Sri Lankan Muslim organizations in 2016 for advocating extreme fundamentalist indoctrination of children and for clashes with Buddhist monks. In 2018, NTJ was linked to vandalism of Buddhist statues.

Analysis

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said in an address to the nation that authorities had received warnings but “not enough attention had been paid.” One of his cabinet ministers, Harin Fernando, tweeted an internal police memo dated April 11 warning a group called National Thowheed Jamath planned to bomb Catholic churches and the Indian High Commission.

The death toll rose to 290 in the coordinated attacks on Easter Sunday at churches and luxury hotels, which the government said had been carried out by seven suicide bombers. The Easter Sunday assaults targeted foreign tourists and Christians, marking a shift from the violence that fueled a three-decade civil war on the Indian Ocean island.

"There had been several warnings from foreign intelligence agencies about the impending attacks," Sri Lanka’s Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne said at a press conference in Colombo. "Persons named in intelligence reports are among those arrested. Some named in the reports had died during attacks."

A sense of unease pervaded the nation following a period of relative calm in the decade since the end of a brutal conflict between the predominately Buddhist Sinhalese majority and mostly Hindu Tamil minority. Police recovered 87 low explosive detonators abandoned at a bus stand in the Pettah area of the capital on Monday, according to an emailed statement, while a bomb disposal squad conducted a controlled explosion in the capital after finding explosives in an abandoned vehicle.

Several blasts occurred hours after the first explosions on Sunday, and experts detonated a pipe bomb found on a road near Colombo’s airport. Authorities imposed a nationwide curfew and blocked platforms like Facebook and Whatsapp.

The Colombo Stock Exchange put its Monday opening on hold and schools will remain closed until Wednesday. Sri Lankan Airlines Ltd. advised travellers to arrive four hours before their flights to undergo additional security checks.

Assessment

Our assessment is that this was not an intelligence failure, rather this was a failure of acting on credible intelligence reports. We believe the attacks will test a government that’s reeling from a political crisis last year that has weighed on the economy and led to downgrades in Sri Lanka’s credit rating. We also feel that the attack is bad news for the country where the memories of the civil war are still very much alive. This was the first attack in Sri Lanka since the LTTE was defeated in 2009, and it has the potential to re-ignite the sparks of Sri Lanka’s bloody ethnic conflicts.

Image Courtesy: AKS.9955, The Kingsbury Hotel, CC BY-SA 4.0