Sri Lanka’s top minister has said authorities are investigating the opportunity that the terrorist phone accountable for the Easter Sunday assaults may additionally have anticipated a second wave of human beings to come ahead to grow to be suicide bombers, as extra violence hit the united states of america amid the police hunt for suspects.
Ranil Wickremesinghe told the Guardian that investigators have been making an attempt to recognize why Islamic State-linked terrorist mobile that killed at least 253 humans had such a large quantity of explosives they had been but to use, some of which had been dumped in protected houses throughout the country.
“Were they preserving [the explosives] for numbers to build up? Maybe this [the Easter Sunday attacks] would spark off other humans joining the cause. There would have been human beings to provide them explosives,” Wickremesinghe stated on Friday evening at his top ministerial residence in Colombo.
Sri Lanka bombings: the entirety we recognize so far
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It additionally feasible that they had planned to target more web sites on Sunday however had been prevented from doing so when police began to secure the city, he said.
As Wickremesinghe used to be speaking, Sri Lankan police in the east of the us of a raided what they said was once the location the place the Islamist radicals had made a video pledging allegiance to the leader of Isis earlier than carrying out their deadly string of bombings.
Police said they discovered an Isis flag and uniforms similar to these worn with the aid of the eight opponents in the movie before they launched the assaults at three luxury resorts and three churches. “We have found the backdrop the group used to file their video,” the police stated in a statement.
The clothing and the flag have been shown on national television, alongside with a hundred and fifty sticks of dynamite and about 100,000 ball bearings also seized from the house.
At other raids in the city of Sammanthurai, 220 miles east of Colombo, officers got here underneath fire late on Friday night and there had been additionally reviews of minor explosions. No casualties have been suggested so far.
Wickremesinghe confirmed that one of Sunday’s bombers, the British-educated Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed, had failed to detonate his explosives in the Taj Samudra motel as he had planned. He retreated to a guesthouse the place he had been staying and by accident killed himself and two others whilst he used to be trying to repair the device. “He was once attempting to restoration it and the whole component exploded,” Wickremesinghe said.
Mohamed’s family had informed authorities that they believed he had turn out to be radicalised while studying in Australia. “That’s the place he regarded to be influenced,” he said. “That’s how the family feel. We comprehend there is some militancy going on in Australia among the Muslims. Australia has been out there war [in the fighting on terror].”
He stated investigators had identified about a hundred and forty supporters and sympathisers of the bombers, about half of of who had been arrested. “A few of them are nevertheless on the move,” he said. “Those are capable of exploding themselves.”
Yet they had now not executed so, he added, main investigators to believe that other humans inclined to sacrifice themselves can also be being sought. “There seems to have been a better format to have used explosives,” Wickremesinghe said. “So the question is, who were they going to carry in later?”
He stated Sri Lankan intelligence had been monitoring at least 32 citizens who were acknowledged to have travelled to Syria and lower back to the island, but that the country’s terrorism law used to be modelled on the UK’s 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act, which was once mainly centered on interior insurgencies like the IRA or the Tamil Tigers.
“Under the act, we can only act in opposition to those who are worried in terrorist recreation towards Sri Lanka, even if they’ve been abroad,” he said. “That’s the only greater territorial jurisdiction that we have.”
The UK has on account that updated its legal guidelines to allow the arrest of overseas combatants however Sri Lanka’s equivalent reform was still being debated in the committees of the country’s parliament, he said.
Sri Lanka’s pinnacle police officer, Pujith Jayasundara, resigned his publish on Friday, a day after the country’s secretary of defence, Hemasiri Fernando, also quit. Both have been singled out for failing to pass by on essential intelligence warning that Islamist radicals have been planning suicide attacks on popular churches.
Wickremesinghe said the “paralysis in the system” that averted the talent from being taken critically would be investigated, but the first precedence was once the immediately danger the united states nevertheless faced. “First focus on getting this beneath manipulate and then we can spend all our time investigating, but first get this underneath contro
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