Sri Lanka attacks

Sri Lanka Was Warned of Possible Attacks. Why Didn’t It Stop Them?

The confidential security memo laid it all out: names, addresses, phone numbers, even the times in the middle of the night that one suspect would visit his wife.

In the days leading up to the devastating suicide attacks that killed nearly 300 people in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, the country’s security agencies had been closely watching a secretive cell of the National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a little-known radical Islamist organization that security officials in Sri Lanka now say carried out the attacks.

The security agencies had even been given specific intelligence that the group, also known by the spelling National Thowheed Jama’ath, was planning to bomb Catholic churches. 

And within hours of when three churches and three hotels were bombed, Sri Lankan security services seized at least 24 suspects, implying that they knew exactly where this group was operating and were quickly able to locate their safe houses.

Why the security agencies failed to act before the bombings — and why some top officials, including the country’s own prime minister, didn’t even know about the intelligence that the agencies possessed — are enormous questions that have created a crisis in the Sri Lankan government.

A seriously huge clusterfuck.

A very thorough article.

Much further down we see this.

The National Thowheeth Jama’ath group emerged around 2015 in the aftermath of attacks against Muslims. 

A majority Buddhist nation, Sri Lanka has been mostly spared the religious-driven bloodshed of other South Asian nations, such as India and Pakistan.

But in recent years some Buddhist monks have turned militant and incited followers to attack Muslims, their places of worship and some of their businesses, such as slaughterhouses. 

The Sri Lankan government’s security services appeared to have turned a blind eye, allowing Buddhist mobs to act with impunity.

In 2014, scores were injured and three people were killed in Buddhist-Muslim clashes. In response, some Muslims joined radical Islamist groups that they believed would defend their faith.

. . . .

The group [National Thowheeth Jama’ath] had never attempted such a devastating, coordinated attack, with numerous suicide bombers striking different places nearly simultaneously.

“The target selection and attack type make me very skeptical that this was carried out by a local group without any outside involvement,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, a specialist in Sri Lankan extremism at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counterterrorism research group in London. 

“There’s no reason for local extremist groups to attack churches, and little reason to attack tourists.”