Bombers’ life of luxury before Easter attacks
Inside the sprawling home with a white BMW parked outside, there was a terrifying secret.
At least three of the suicide bombers who struck Sri Lanka on Easter belonged to the same extended family, police said. The patriarch was one of the country’s most successful spice traders.
Two of his sons carried out attacks early Sunday morning, according to law enforcement. Later that afternoon, they said, as police entered the family residence, his daughter-in-law detonated explosives, killing herself and three officers.
The role played by the family in the devastating attacks that killed 359 people was one of several new details about the plot that emerged yesterday, as Sri Lanka continued to bury its dead and investigators raced to understand whether the perpetrators had help from abroad.
The group that unleashed Sunday’s attacks on Sri Lanka included nine suicide bombers who detonated explosives in churches, hotels and inside the home belonging to the family, authorities said.
The leader was a man named Zaharn Hashim, who is believed to be in his 40s and expounded extremist views in online sermons.
Authorities said the group’s leader carried out a suicide attack on Colombo’s Shangri-La Hotel.
The bombers were a radical splinter group that broke off from a local Islamist militant outfit called National Thowheed Jamaath, Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s junior defence minister, told reporters.
Some of them had previous run-ins with the law for minor offences, he said.
The group included ‘‘quite well-educated people’’ from comfortable backgrounds, Wijewardene said. One perpetrator studied in Britain and pursued a master’s degree in Australia, he said.
Authorities said they had identified eight of the nine bombers but declined to provide further details while the investigation was ongoing. Yesterday, the nation’s Parliament passed regulations giving emergency powers to the police and military to detain suspects, and for the fourth day in a row, authorities imposed a nationwide nighttime curfew.
In response to a growing furor about the government’s failure to act on earlier intelligence that warned of potential attacks, President Maithripala Sirisena ordered two top national security officials to resign. Pujith Jayasundara, the country’s police chief, and Hemasiri Fernando, the top civil servant at the Defence Ministry, stepped down.
In Dematagoda, a quiet, prosperous neighbourhood lined with spacious homes, sits the threestorey residence belonging to a businessman known professionally as Y.M. Ibrahim and whom police refer to simply as Ibrahim. The house where he lives with his extended family takes up much of a block and was cordoned off with police tape yesterday.
Neighbours spoke fondly of Ibrahim, whom they described as a man from a modest background who rose to become a wealthy exporter of spices such as pepper and cinnamon. – Washington Post