Two brothers carried out two of the hotel suicide blasts in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, part of a wave of bombings that killed more than 321 people, police sources said Tuesday.
The sons of a wealthy Colombo spice trader were amongsuicide bombers who hit three churches and three luxury hotels, investigatorstold AFP.
An attack on a fourth hotel failed and helped lead police tothe Islamist group now blamed for the assault, they added. The brothers, whosenames have not been revealed, were in their late twenties and operated theirown “family cell”, an investigation officer said.
The pair were key members of the Islamist NationalThowheedJama’ath (NTJ) group which the government has blamed for the attacks,the official added.
One brother checked into the Cinnamon Grand hotel and theother the Shangri-La on Saturday.
The next morning, at virtually the same time, they went tothe hotels’ Easter Sunday breakfast buffets and blew up explosives-ladenbackpacks, the officer said.
Another bomb tore through a restaurant at the nearby Kingsbury hotel. Minutes before, similar explosions devastated three churches.
Investigators said it was not known whether the brothers were in contact with the other bombers. Another would-be suicide bomber walked into a fourth luxury hotel in Colombo on Sunday, official sources told AFP. “This man had also checked into the hotel the previous day,” the source said. It was not known if his explosives failed or he had a change of heart.
But after the Shangri-la blast, staff at the unnamed hotelbecame suspicious and the man was tracked to a lodging near the capital. Heblew himself up there when confronted by police, the source said. Twobystanders were also killed.
“What we have seen from the CCTV footage is that allthe suicide bombers were carrying very heavy backpacks. These appear to becrude devices made locally,” the source said.
With 321 people confirmed dead, including at least 39foreign nationals, and over 500 wounded, Sri Lanka has declared a state ofemergency and launched a desperate hunt to head off more attacks.
The whereabouts of the brothers’ parents was unknown. Butthe blasts had a further impact on the family.
One brother gave false identity details when he checked intothe hotel, the investigator said. The other gave a real address which ledpolice commandos to their family home in a commercial area of Colombo.
“When the Special Task Force went there to investigate,one brother’s wife set off explosives killing herself and her two children,”the officer said.
“It was a single terror cell operated by onefamily,” the investigator said.
“They had the cash and the motivation. They operatedthe cell and it is believed they influenced their extended family.”
The brothers had been involved in their father’s lucrativespice export business, investigators said.
A focus of the inquiry will be to find out whether there was a foreign influence in their radicalisation and how the children of such a wealthy family had become involved, an official source said.