Colombo: The death toll in Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday bomb attacks has risen to 359, police said on Wednesday amidst nationwide search operations to nab the perpetrators of the country’s worst terror attack. So far 60 people have been arrested in connection with the attacks, police spokesman Ruwan Guansekera said.
“The number of death now is 359,” he said.
More than 500 people have been injured in the bombings.
Defence Minister Ruwan Wijewardene, addressing a press conference here, accepted that there had been a major lapse in security arrangements.
“We (the government) have to take the responsibility. The President (Maithripala Sirisena) is planning to make some changes in the security establishments,” he said.
Intelligence suggested that the attackers were motivated by the Christchurch shootings, the minister said. “One of the suicide bombers studied overseas.
Most of them are well-educated, and come from maybe middle-class or upper-middle-class.
So they are financially quite independent and their families are quite stable financially.
“We believe that one of the suicide bombers studied in the UK and maybe later on did his post-graduate in Australia, before coming back to settle in Sri Lanka,” Wijewardene said. (PTI)
