After living through a bloody civil war that dragged on for three decades, the people of Sri Lanka are no strangers to terror.
But the carnage that unfolded yesterday saw the country’s enemies take on new depths of depravity.
It had all the hallmarks of the barbaric Islamic State group – executed meticulously and without mercy.
Within minutes of yesterday’s blasts, MI5 was trying to establish if there were any British links to those who could be behind the plot. There were no immediate claims of responsibility, nor any established motive for the attack, although 13 suspects had been arrested by last night.
Early evidence pointed to the National Thowheed Jamaath (NTJ), a relatively unknown radical Islamist group said to have formed in Kattankudy, a Muslim-dominated town in eastern Sri Lanka, in 2014.
It has no history of mass fatality attacks.
Alex and Anita Nicholson photographed in London in 2015. Both were killed in the bomb blast in the Shangri-La hotel
Last photo: Shantha Mayadunne (second left) and her daughter Nisanga (right) were among the victims of the Sri Lanka bomb attacks on Sunday. The family posted this picture of their Easter breakfast at the Shangri-La hotel just before the blast there
A map showing where the eight blasts went off today, six of them in very quick succession on Easter Sunday morning
ISIS militants marching in Raqqa, Syria, in 2014. This year the fundamentalists were driven from the last land they occupied but security experts have warned of 'pop up' terror cells
In fact, its only mention appears to be last year when it was linked to the vandalism of Buddhist statues.
Sources in the Muslim community in Sri Lanka claim the group has publicly supported Islamic State. They also say that Zahran Hashim, named in reports as one of the bombers, was its founder.
Although intelligence files on the group are small, there is no doubt the warning signs were there.
On April 11, Sri Lankan police circulated a document entitled ‘Information of an alleged plan attack’ which said they had been warned by an unnamed foreign intelligence agency that the NTJ was plotting suicide attacks on churches in Colombo.
It added that intelligence pointed to any of the following methods: suicide attack, weapon attack or truck attack.
The original warning is most likely to have come from Australia – one of the ‘five eyes’ with a close intelligence-sharing relationship with Britain – that has kept watch on the rise of extremism in the region.
Documents show that Sri Lanka’s police chief Pujuth Jayasundara then issued an intelligence alert to top officers, specifically warning that suicide bombers planned to hit ‘prominent churches’.
Sri Lanka's defence ministry has now ordered curfew with immediate effect 'until further notice', and the Sri Lankan government said it had shut down access to social media messaging services, sources say
Hospital staff push a trolley with a casualty after an explosion at a church in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka
A crime scene official inspects the site of a bomb blast inside a church in Negombo, Sri Lanka, which lost half its roof tiles with the force of the blast
