Sri Lankan intelligence has named the mastermind behind the Easter Sunday attacks as Moulvi Zahran Hashim, an extremist local cleric who incited his followers to violence with fiery sermons on his social media channels.
The revelation comes after senior government officials accused the National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ) a little-known group promoting Islamist terrorist ideology, as the perpetrators of the suicide bombings and with ISIS taking the responsibility for the attacks.
Sri Lanka’s minister of defence Ruwan Wijewardene also told parliament that preliminary investigations have revealed that what happened in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday was in retaliation for the attack against Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The country’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe said the Islamic State (IS) group may be linked to the blasts.
Wickremesinghe said the government believed Sunday’s attacks could not have been carried out without help from terror groups abroad.
In the meantime, Sri Lanka’s president Maithripala Sirisena vowed to overhaul state security after reports of deficiencies in the in the way sensitive information regarding the possibility of attacks was handled.
Police on Wednesday raised the death toll from the bombings to 359 from the previous 321.
