(COLOMBO, Sri Lanka) — Sri Lanka’s president says “99%” of the suspects in Easter Sunday attacks on churches and hotels have been arrested and their explosive materials seized, and that it is safe for tourists to return to the Indian Ocean island nation.
“The country is in a safe position right now,” President Maithripala Sirisena said in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday.
More than 250 people were killed in coordinated suicide bombings carried out by Sri Lankan militants at churches full of people celebrating Easter services and at luxury hotels in the capital, Colombo, popular with foreign tourists.
The dead included dozens of foreigners.
Sirisena said he was not told of near-specific advance information from Indian intelligence sources describing the plot and providing names and whereabouts of the attackers in at least three instances. He was out of the country on a private trip to Singapore on the day of the attacks. Upon his return, he demanded the resignation of his defense secretary and chief of police.
Sirisena said the violence wasn’t a problem specific to Sri Lanka, instead ascribing it to “global terrorism.”
Police have said two previously little-known groups — National Towheed Jamaat and Jammiyathul Millathu Ibrahim — conspired in the attacks.
Officials say Zahran Hashim, a radical Islamic preacher from the country’s east, may have led the attackers and was one of the nine suicide bombers to die.
Two days after the bombings, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility and later released a video of Hashim and other men pledging their loyalty to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Later, al-Baghdad praised the attackers in a video that was his first public appearance in nearly five years.
