https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/22/a...ntl/index.html

Colombo, Sri Lanka (CNN) - When a series of suicide bombstore apart churches and hotels across Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, most of the country -- and the rest of the world -- was taken completely by surprise. But in the capital, Colombo, it was not a shock to everyone.
Some elements of the government here had known for weeks about warnings of a potential attack on churches and tourist destinations.
Intelligence services in India and the US told Sri Lanka of the threat in early April, officials said. One memo compiled by Sri Lankan security officials was so specific that it even gave a list of suspects. In the runup to the holiest day in the Christian calendar, the warnings seemed to increase in frequency and urgency.
But none made any difference.
When suicide bombers walked into three churches around Sri Lanka, and three upscale hotels in Colombo, they faced no enhanced security. As worshipers closed their eyes in prayer, as hotel guests lined up for breakfast, the attackers detonated their devices -- and the effects were devastating.
It was unclear on Monday why the red flags went unheeded. But Sri Lanka has been wracked by political divisions since a constitutional crisis last year, when President Maithripala Sirisena attempted to replace the incumbent Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, with a favored candidate. Wickremesinghe was reinstated in December after the intervention of the Supreme Court, but the government remains deeply divided.
Now, there are fears that the political feuding could have provided a window for a catastrophic security lapse that could reverberate across the region.
Series of warnings
The origins of what appears to be a spectacular security failure go back more than two weeks. On April 4, foreign intelligence agencies told Sri Lankan officials of a potential plot to launch suicide attacks against Christian churches and tourist spots, according to government spokesman Rajitha Senaratne.
Five days later, on April 9, the country's Defense Ministry informed the Inspector General of Police of this alleged plot, and named a group believed to be behind the plan, the Nations Thawahid Jaman (NTJ). Unusually, the memo also included a list of suspects.
On April 11, another memo, signed by Priyalal Dissanayake, the Deputy Inspector General of Police, was circulated widely to a range of security services and some government ministries, according to Senaratne and a police source. That memo, a copy of which has been seen by CNN, laid out the threat and again contained a list of suspects.

Security personnel inspect the interior of St Sebastian's Church in Negombo on April 22, 2019, a day after the church was hit in series of bomb blasts.
Foreign security services repeated their warnings in the days and hours before the attack, Senaratne told reporters on Monday. One warning came ten minutes before the blasts, he claimed -- although it was not clear whether he was speaking with precision.
An economy minister, Harsha de Silva, said he later learned that those warnings came from came from Sri Lanka's nearest neighbor, India, and from the US. Their content? "Something terrible was to happen," he told CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
Government infighting
All of this came against the backdrop of the divisions within government that lingered from constitutional crisis of 2018. In his interview with CNN, De Silva said the Prime Minister was "kept in the dark" about the warnings.
Senaratne, who is also a health minister, said the Prime Minister had been removed from the national security council in December, and therefore did not receive confidential security briefings.
Even after the attack, members of the national security council refused to attend a meeting called by the Prime Minister, Senaratne claimed. "I think this is the only country in the world where the security council does not like to come when summoned by the Prime Minister of the country," he said.
Referring to the warnings about the involvement of the NTJ in a potential attack, Senaratne said he did not believe a local group could have acted alone. "There must be a wider international network behind it," he told reporters.
In a statement reported by Reuters, President Sirisena said the Sri Lankan government would seek would seek foreign assistance as it investigated potential international links to the attack. His office would not comment on the apparent failure to heed warnings, Reuters said.
De Silva, an ally of the Prime Minister, argued the Sunday's terrible loss of life did not amount to a failure of intelligence, but a failure to mount an appropriate response to that intelligence.

Sri Lankan priests look at the debris of a car after it explodes when police tried to defuse a bomb near St. Anthony's Shrine a day after the Easter Sunday attacks.
Focus on Islamist group
The group named in the memos as planning an attack, Nations Thawahid Jaman, has hitherto acted only in the margins, blamed for little more than defacing Buddhist statues.
According to Saroj Kumar Rath, a terrorism and security expert at the University of Delhi, NTJ has its origins in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu in the early 2000s.
Manoj Joshi, a fellow at Indian think tank Observer Research Foundation, said that NTJ had carried out protests at places like liquor stores in the past, but he wasn't aware that it had initiated any previous terror attacks.
There are numerous small groups like the NTJ around India and South Asia, Joshi said. "The problem was that this group did not have a history of any kind (of violence) in the past. They (the authorities) may have been blindsided by the lack of focus on this group," Joshi said, noting that that while Sri Lanka was no stranger to terrorist attacks, violence in the country has historically existed under a very different context.
Mainstream Muslim groups have said they tried to warn the Sri Lankan authorities about the potential danger posed by NTJ. But its relative obscurity has raised questions about whether it would have had the capacity to carry out such a sophisticated and coordinated attack alone.
Dhruva Jaishankar, a fellow in foreign policy studies at Brookings India, told CNN that while it was premature to speculate on which organizations might have been involved, the role of "a larger organization cannot be dismissed."
"It's a bit of a stretch for an organization like that to conduct sophisticated simultaneous explosions," he said of NTJ.
Jaishankar said there was a known presence of ISIS-linked groups in neighboring India, the Maldives, and Bangladesh -- as well as Pakistan and the Philippines -- but that there was little evidence of ISIS activity in Sri Lanka.
What seems clear, Jaishankar said, is that the assault had a religious motivation and was also designed to target foreigners. "These are people who wanted to hurt Sri Lanka's reputation," he said.
The coordination and planning of Sunday's attacks -- involving multiple high profile targets, suicide bombers and powerful bombs -- appears to have been intense, and must have been long in the works.
Sri Lankan authorities have already admitted to missing multiple warning signs. Now, a nation still reeling in horror from Sunday's bloodshed is waiting to see just how widespread the failure was, and how much of a role the country's dysfunctional politics played in it.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sri-lan...tacks-ignored/

Colombo, Sri Lanka-- Sri Lankan officials failed to heed warnings from intelligence agencies about the threat of an attack by a domestic radical Muslim group that officials blame for Easter Sunday bombings that killed more than 200 people, the country's health minister said Monday. The coordinated bombings that ripped through churches and luxury hotels were carried out by seven suicide bombers from a militant group named National Thowfeek Jamaath, Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne said. 

International intelligence agencies warned of the attacks several times starting April 4, Senaratne said. On April 9, the defense ministry wrote to the police chief with intelligence that included the group's name, he said. 
Police chief Pujuth Jayasundara issued an intelligence alert to top officers on April 11, according to French news agency AFP, warning that suicide bombers from a radical Muslim group were planning to attack "prominent churches."  
It was not immediately clear what action, if any, was taken in response to the warnings. Authorities said little was known about the group except that its name had appeared in intelligence reports.
Because of political dysfunction within the government, Seranatne said, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and his Cabinet were kept in the dark about the intelligence until after the attacks.
President Maithrela Sirisena, who was out of the country at the time of the attacks, ousted Wickremesinghe in late October and dissolved the Cabinet. The Supreme Court eventually reversed his actions, but the prime minister has not been allowed into meetings of the Security Council since October. 

All of the bombers were Sri Lankan citizens, but authorities suspect foreign links, Senaratne said.
Earlier, Ariyananda Welianga, a government forensic crime investigator, said an analysis of the attackers' body parts made clear that they were suicide bombers. He said most of the attacks were carried out by individual bombers, with two at Colombo's Shangri-La Hotel.
The bombings, Sri Lanka's deadliest violence since a devastating civil war ended a decade ago on the island nation, killed at least 290 people with more than 500 wounded, Police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara said Monday.
Meanwhile, Sri Lankan police investigating the bombings are examining reports that intelligence agencies had warnings of possible attacks, officials said Monday.

Two government ministers have alluded to intelligence failures. Telecommunications Minister Harin Fernando tweeted, "Some intelligence officers were aware of this incidence. Therefore there was a delay in action. Serious action needs to be taken as to why this warning was ignored." He said his father had heard of the possibility of an attack as well and had warned him not to enter popular churches. 
And Mano Ganeshan, the minister for national integration, said his ministry's security officers had been warned by their division about the possibility that two suicide bombers would target politicians.
The police's Criminal Investigation Department, which is handling the investigation into the blasts, will look into those reports, Gunasekara said.
Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the archbishop of Colombo, said the attacks could have been thwarted.
"We placed our hands on our heads when we came to know that these deaths could have been avoided. Why this was not prevented?" he said.
Earlier, Defense Minister Ruwan Wijewardena described the blasts as a terrorist attack by religious extremists, and police said 13 suspects had been arrested, though there was no immediate claim of responsibility.
The Tamil Tigers, once a powerful rebel army known for its use of suicide bombers, was crushed by the government in 2009, and had little history of targeting Christians. While anti-Muslim bigotry has swept the island in recent years, fed by Buddhist nationalists, the island also has no history of violent Muslim militants. The country's small Christian community has seen only scattered incidents of harassment in recent years.