By ANNISA ESSACK

24:04:2019

A pair of brothers from a wealthy, upper-class family, a husband and wife. A man with a law degree and another who studied in the United Kingdom and did post-graduate work in Australia, before returning home to his native Sri Lanka.

Those are the profiles emerging today of the suicide bombers who killed more than 350 people in sophisticated, coordinated attacks on churches and hotels there on Easter Sunday. If the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility is true, it would be the groups’ deadliest-ever terror attack.

Police spokesman Ruwan Gunasekara told reporters today that there were nine suicide bombers, not seven, as previously stated. The female bomber was the wife of another bomber and detonated a bomb killing herself along with her two children as police moved in to search a house they were in, in the aftermath of the attacks. Three police officers also died in the blast. 

Defence Minister Ruwan Wijewardene, today backed off previous claims that the Easter attacks were in retaliation for shootings last month at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He told reporters the mosque attacks may have been a motivation, but that there was no direct evidence of that.

Meanwhile, advance warnings about the Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka came from an ISIS suspect in India. India’s intelligence service is said to have learnt specific information during interrogations with the suspect who told investigators the name of a man, Zahran Hashim, whom he trained in Sri Lanka.

Hashim is connected to a local extremist group implicated in the bombings and is identified in a video, released by ISIS, that purportedly shows the attackers and claims responsibility for the attacks. India passed all this info on to Sri Lankan officials, but the warnings went unheeded.

Sixty people have been arrested in connection with the attacks on churches and hotels, including Mohamed Ibrahim, a wealthy businessman who imported spices and owned the home in Colombo’s Dematagoda neighbourhood where the police conducted a raid on Sunday. According to Wijewardene the bombers had split from the National Thowheed Jamaath, an obscure extremist group based in the eastern part of the country. The leader of the splinter group carried out the suicide attack on Colombo’s Shangri-La hotel. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for Sunday’s attacks, but Sri Lankan authorities said its role remains unclear. Wijewardene said there was a connection to the Islamic State “through ideology and maybe funding,” but the latter is still under investigation.

The country remained on edge today, and authorities carried out controlled explosions on motorbikes in downtown Colombo and the suburb of Maradama, as well as on a package near a restaurant in the town of Katana.