Tag Archives: Authorities

Sri Lanka security authorities were trying to head off bombers when they struck: official

A man comes to the site of a mass burial to pay his respects to victims of a string of suicide bomb attacks on churches and luxury hotels on Easter Sunday, in Negombo, Sri Lanka April 25, 2019. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha

By Ranga Sirilal and Shihar Aneez

COLOMBO (Reuters) – Sri Lanka’s top defense official said on Thursday that security agencies had been working to stop militant attacks in the days before Easter Sunday bombings that killed 359 people, and he was resigning to take responsibility for the failure.

The suicide bomb attacks on three churches and four hotels exposed a significant intelligence failure, with warnings of strikes not acted on and accusations of feuds at the highest levels of government undermining security cooperation.

Police issued names and photographs of seven people, three of them women, wanted in connection with the attacks, as bomb scares and security sweeps kept the country on edge.

“We were working on that. All those agencies were working on that,” Defense Secretary Hemasiri Fernando told Reuters, referring to intelligence tips from India warning of imminent strikes that came in over the days before the blasts.

Fernando, the top civil servant at the government’s defense department, said he had resigned to take responsibility for institutions he was in charge of, though he added there had been no failure on his part.

The Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks. If that connection is confirmed, it looks likely to be the deadliest ever such attack linked to the group.

Most of the victims were Sri Lankans, although authorities have said at least 38 foreigners were also killed, many of them tourists sitting down to breakfast at top-end hotels when the bombers struck.

They included British, U.S., Australian, Turkish, Indian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch and Portuguese nationals.

About 500 people were wounded.

Authorities have focused their investigations on international links to two domestic Islamist groups – National Thawheed Jama’ut and Jammiyathul Millathu Ibrahim – they believe carried out the attacks.

Islamic State released a video that showed eight men, all but one with their faces covered, standing under a black Islamic State flag and declaring their loyalty to its leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

The government said there were nine suicide bombers, eight of whom had been identified, and that one was a woman.

SNAPSHOTS

A picture has emerged of a group of nine well-educated, home-grown suicide bombers. Two of them were brothers, sons of a wealthy spice trader and pillar of the business community, a source close to the family said.

One studied in Britain and Australia.

At least 76 people, including several foreigners, have been rounded up since Sunday, but police on Thursday for the first time identified seven people they were looking for and appealed to the public for help in finding them.

Photographs, apparently casual snapshots, posted with a wanted notice showed young bearded men, one with a Muslim cap, and three young women, all with head scarves.

Fears that more bombers are at large has kept Sri Lanka on edge all week.

Authorities locked down the central bank and shut the road to the capital’s airport for part of the day because of bomb scares as communal tension simmered.

Office workers in Colombo’s business district were asked to go home early, police said, to avoid vulnerable throngs of people at rush hour. City-center restaurants were also shutting early.

Police also arrested three people and seized 21 locally made grenades and six swords during a raid in Colombo, a spokesman said. He did not give details or suggest that the raid was linked to the suicide bombings.

RECRIMINATIONS

The bombings shattered the relative calm that has existed in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka since a civil war against mostly Hindu, ethnic Tamil separatists ended 10 years ago, and raised fears of a return to sectarian violence.

Sri Lanka’s 22 million people include minority Christians, Muslims and Hindus. Until now, Christians had largely managed to avoid the worst of the island’s conflict and communal tensions.

It seems unlikely that Fernando’s resignation will end the questions and recriminations over why authorities failed to act more effectively to stop the plotters.

Government officials have acknowledged a major lapse in the sharing of intelligence information. Lakshman Kiriella, the leader of parliament, said senior officials had deliberately withheld the intelligence from India about possible attacks.

Both President Maithripala Sirisena and his rival, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, denied seeing the Indian intelligence warnings, officials have said.

The president fired Wickremesinghe last October over political differences, only to reinstate him weeks later under pressure from the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, fears are growing of a surge of communal tension.

Muslims have fled the Negombo region on Sri Lanka’s west coast since scores of worshippers were killed in the bombing of the St. Sebastian church there on Sunday.

Hundreds of Pakistani Muslims have left the port city, crammed into buses, after threats of revenge.

“The local Sri Lankan people have attacked our houses,” one of them, Adnan Ali, told Reuters on Wednesday, as he prepared to board a bus.

 

(Reporting by Shihar Aneez and Ranga Sirilal; Additional reporting by Sanjeev Miglani in COLOMBO, Alasdair Pal and Sunil Kataria in NEGOMBO, Sri Lanka, and Will Ziebell in MELBOURNE; Writing by Paul Tait and Robert Birsel; Editing by Michael Perry and Alex Richardson)

In Fuego volcano’s wake, a Guatemalan town became a cemetery

A house covered with ash is seen after the eruption of the Fuego volcano in San Miguel Los Lotes in Escuintla, Guatemala, June 6, 2018. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

By Carlos Jasso and Sofia Menchu

SAN MIGUEL LOS LOTES, Guatemala (Reuters) – There was no time to eat. Sunday family lunches were interrupted, the food left on the table. Children abandoned toys, and clothes still hung on lines in backyards. Animals died petrified.

Guatemalan authorities reacted slowly to signs of the Fuego volcano’s impending eruption on June 3, contributing to one of the most tragic natural disasters in recent Guatemalan history.

The volcano rumbled to life early that Sunday. By midday, it was spewing ash in smoking columns miles high that then fell, dusting a wide swath of the Central American country.

But with the mountain’s rumbles and the first ash showers, many villagers made a fatal bet to stay put, gambling that luck that had protected them for decades would hold once again.

In the afternoon things took a turn for the worse. Tons of ash propelled by scalding, toxic gases poured down Fuego’s flanks. These “pyroclastic flows” hit much faster, more lethal speeds than lava, dragging trees and giant rocks down onto villages in their path.

By the time most families in the worst-hit hamlets of El Rodeo and San Miguel de Los Lotes knew what was happening, they only had time to run, if that.

“My family was having lunch, they left the plates of food and stopped eating and fled,” said Pedro Gomez, a 45-year-old welder. “They took nothing but their clothes on their backs.”

Now, everything in the previously lush, bright green landscape is coated in thick layers of sepia-colored volcanic ash, giving the place the eerie feeling of a ghost ship. Where once there was life, there is heat, dust and a lingering smell of sulfur.

In one home, the pages of a Bible are singed. Outside, cattle lay dead. A bass drum lay abandoned. In kitchens, there was food in pots ready to be served.

At least 110 people have died and close to 200 are thought buried under the rubble in the hamlet on the fertile lower slopes of the volcano. Fuego – Spanish for “fire” – rises between the regions of Sacatepequez, Escuintla and Chimaltenango about 30 miles (50 km) from Guatemala City, the nation’s capital.

Rescuers searching for bodies walked on the roofs of houses as if they were floors, digging down into buildings where they have found only corpses of those who stayed behind. Only a few dogs, chickens, rabbits and cats survived.

As the burning volcanic matter rushed at them, some escaped on foot, others by car.

“I took out the pickup truck and escaped with a lot of neighbors when we saw the smoke,” said Alejandro Velasquez, 46, a farmer.

Others with still less time ran through bushes and leaped across barbed wire and wooden fences to reach the main road of the town of Escuintla, near Los Lotes.

Many lost 10 to 50 relatives each, descendents of intertwining generations of a small families who settled in Los Lotes more than 40 years ago. They refuse to give up hope of finding relatives – or at least their remains. “My entire family is missing,” said Jose Ascon. The young man argued with police who had temporarily halted rescue efforts after more flows from the eruption.

“I would give my life to find my family.”

 

(Reporting by Carlos Jasso and Sofia Menchu; writing by Delphine Schrank; editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Jonathan Oatis)

Second French church attacker was known to police: sources

French police guard stand in front of church

By Chine Labbé and Michel Rose

PARIS/SAINT-ETIENNE-DU-ROUVRAY, France (Reuters) – The second teenager involved in the killing of a priest in a church in France this week was a 19-year-old who was known to security services as a potential Islamist militant, police and judicial sources said on Thursday.

The man also appears to be a suspect that police were looking for in recent days after a tipoff from a foreign intelligence service that he was planning an attack, the police sources said.

The revelations are likely to fuel criticism by opposition politicians that President Francois Hollande’s Socialist government did not do enough to stop the pair given that they were already under police surveillance.

They interrupted a church service, forced a 85-year-old Roman Catholic priest to his knees at the altar and slit his throat. They were both shot and killed by police.

Police have identified the second man as Abdel-Malik Nabil Petitjean from a town in eastern France on the border with Germany, a judicial source told Reuters.

Security services had on June 29 opened a special file on Petitjean for becoming radicalized, a police source said separately. The government has said there are about 10,500 people with so-called ‘S files’ related to potential jihadi activities in France.

His accomplice, Adel Kermiche, had already been identified by police. He was known to intelligence services after failed bids to reach Syria to wage jihad.

Kermiche, also 19, wore an electronic bracelet and was awaiting trial for alleged membership of a terrorist organization having been released on bail.

Acting on a tipoff from a foreign intelligence agency France’s intelligence services sent a photo to various security forces, but did not have a name, sources close to the investigation said.

Police did not have the name of the person in the photo but now have little doubt that it is Petitjean, the police sources said.

The person in the photo appears to be one of two people who can be seen in a video posted on Wednesday by Islamic State’s news agency, they said. The video claimed the two men were the church attackers pledging allegiance to the group’s leader.

Petitjean’s mother Yamina told BFM TV that her son had never spoken about Islamic State. Three people close to Petitjean have been detained in police custody, a judicial source said. A 16-year-old, being held since Tuesday in connection with the attack, is still in custody.

Tuesday’s attack came less than two weeks after another suspected Islamist drove a truck into a Bastille Day crowd, killing 84 people.

Opposition politicians have responded to the attacks with strong criticism of the government’s security record, unlike last year, when they made a show of unity after gunmen and bombers killed 130 people at Paris entertainment venues in November and attacked a satirical newspaper in January.

Hollande’s predecessor and potential opponent in a presidential election next year, Nicolas Sarkozy, has said the government must take stronger steps to track known Islamist sympathizers.

He has called for the detention or electronic tagging of all suspected Islamist militants, even if they have committed no offense.

Kermiche’s tag did not send an alarm because the attack took place during the four hour period when he was allowed out.

According to the justice ministry, there are just 13 terrorism suspects and people convicted of terrorist links wearing tags such as the one worn by Kermiche. Seven are on pre-trial bail. The other six have been convicted but wear the electronic bracelet instead of serving a full jail term.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve rejected Sarkozy’s proposal, saying that to jail them would be unconstitutional and counterproductive.

He has said summer festivals that do not meet tight security standards would be canceled, and announced a shift in the deployment of 10,000 soldiers already on the streets, saying more would now be sent to the provinces.

Since the Bastille Day killings in Nice, there has been a spate of attacks in Germany too, creating greater alarm in Western Europe already reeling from last year’s attacks in France and attacks this year in Brussels.

(Reporting by Chine Labbe; writing by Leigh Thomas; Editing by Andrew Callus and Anna Willard)