Sri Lanka was Lonely Planet’s No. 1 travel destination for 2019. The attacks are ‘a big blow’
Kithsiri De Silva, the head chef at Sri Lanka’s venerable Kingsbury Hotel, walked through the main restaurant during breakfast Sunday, greeting diners and surveying the extravagant buffet.
He would have seen, he thinks now with dread, the guest who moments later detonated a suicide bomb in the middle of the dining room, one of a coordinated sequence of blasts against hotels and churches.
Sri Lanka on Thursday lowered the death toll in the attacks to 253, saying there were so many body parts in the aftermath of the eight blasts that authorities had committed a “miscalculation” when they said 359 had died.
The bombings claimed by Islamic State — still among the deadliest terrorist attacks in the world in recent years — have shattered Sri Lanka’s fragile recovery from civil war and threaten to undo a decade-long effort to make its economy friendlier to tourists and foreign investment.
“It will affect us for a minimum of a year,” said De Silva, who survived the blast without serious injuries. “We have to clear the entire country, make sure security is in place, then people might come back. It is a big blow to tourism, to be sure.”
The country remained on edge Thursday as police released the names and photographs of six suspects — including three women — and asked for the public’s help in apprehending them. But an already confused government response got even more muddled when one of the photos turned out to be of a Maryland Muslim women’s activist, Amara Majeed. Officials withdrew the photo and said they regretted the error.
The U.S. Embassy warned that “terrorist groups continue plotting possible attacks in Sri Lanka” against tourist sites, transportation hubs, places of worship and other locations, as security forces conducted search operations across the capital, Colombo. Four days after the attacks, panic flared again as many hotels and businesses ordered staff members to remain indoors amid reports that suspects were at large and possibly armed.
Three people arrested in Colombo were found in possession of swords and a cache of locally made hand grenades, a police official said, bringing the number detained in connection with the attacks to more than 75.
“The whole country is a bit nervous, searching for these suspects,” said Pushpakumara Ratnayake, a security officer at the Cinnamon Grand hotel, one of the three high-end hotels struck in the bombings.
In a sign that the government was worried about religious tensions spilling into more violence, the minister of Muslim religious affairs, Mohamed Hashim Abdul Haleem, appealed to Muslims not to gather at mosques for weekly prayers on Friday but to worship at home “as a sign of solidarity with the Catholic community and a show of protest against the barbaric act of the ruthless terrorists.” Muslims account for about 10% of Sri Lanka’s 21 million people and Christians slightly fewer; the majority of Sri Lankans are Buddhists.
A leading organization of Muslim clerics called on its faithful to cooperate with law enforcement agencies and asked women not to wear the Islamic face veil, or niqab, so they could more easily be identified by security forces.
Full story at Los Angeles Times
