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Sri Lankans celebrate Mass amid excessive security

SHAFAQNA- Per week after Easter suicide bombers killed at least 253 people in Sri Lanka , Catholics have celebrated Sunday mass in their homes via TV broadcast as churches across the island nation remained closed over fears of further attacks.

Cardinal Malcolm Randith, the archbishop of Colombo, delivered a homily from a small chapel at his residence.

“This is a time our hearts are tested by the great destruction that took place last Sunday,” he said.

“This is a time questions such as, does God truly love us, does He have compassion towards us, can arise in human hearts”, sky news reported.

Sri Lanka has been on heightened alert since the bombers, stooping with the weight of the grey backpacks they had packed with explosives, walked into St. Anthony’s, two other churches and three luxury hotels in Colombo to set off their bombs.

Thousands of Sri Lankan troops remained on the streets, guarding churches and mosques for the symbolic day.

A sign on the gate said the church and school would be closed until 6 May, while a nearby mosque also had soldiers stationed outside.

A series of coordinated bombings on Easter Sunday rocked Sri Lanka, killing at least 253 people (with the death toll revised down from 359 by authorities) and wounding 500 others.

The attacks were the deadliest in the island nation since the end of its civil war 10 years ago, and targeted three churches as well as four hotels in the capital Colombo.

Most of the victims were Sri Lankans, although authorities said at least 40 foreigners were also killed, many of them tourists sitting down to breakfast at top-end hotels when the bombers struck.

They included British, US, Australian, Turkish, Indian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch and Portuguese nationals. Britain warned its nationals this week to avoid Sri Lanka unless it was absolutely necessary.

Scores of children, many of them from the same family, are among the victims.

The government has blamed a local hardline group, National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ) for the attacks and has banned the organization, Al Jazeera told.

But ISIS has claimed responsibility for the attacks two days after the attacks, and released a photo of Zahran and the other purported attackers swearing allegiance to the terror group. If true, it would be one of the worst acts of violence carried out by the armed group outside Iraq and Syria

Zahran appears to have been the spiritual leader of the bombers, and may have radicalized several of them. In videos he posted online, he called for attacks on other Muslims, Buddhists and Christians.

Fears of retaliatory sectarian violence have caused Muslim communities to flee their homes amid bomb scares, lockdowns and security sweeps.

Despite warnings against it, several mosques held services anyway on Friday.

At a mosque in Colombo, police armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles stood guard outside for hundreds of worshippers.

The Easter attackers are “not Muslims. This is not Islam. This is an animal”, said Akurana Muhandramlage Jamaldeen Mohamed Jayfer, the chairman of the mosque.

“We don’t have a word [strong enough] to curse them,” he said.

There were also reports by some Muslims of harassment because of their religion.

A local television channel showed people on a bus asking a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf to either remove it or leave the bus. She later left the bus.

Abdul Azeez Abdul Sattar, 63, an auto-rickshaw driver, said a man in his neighbourhood refused to hire him, telling him, “You are a terrorist; you have a bomb. I won’t take your auto.”

“We are totally embarrassed as a community, we have failed as a community to monitor what was happening in our backyard,” said Hilmy Ahamed, vice president of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka. “That is what worries me as a parent of two young boys. We are always worried that they might be radicalized through the internet.”

The attacks revealed the dysfunction at the heart of Sri Lanka’s government. Hours after the attacks, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe issued a call for unity. “I strongly condemn the cowardly attacks on our people today,” he wrote in a post on Twitter. “I call upon all Sri Lankans during this tragic time to remain united and strong. The government is taking immediate steps to contain this situation.”

But in the days that followed, the government was anything but united. Wickremesinghe has blamed President Maithripala Sirisena for keeping him out of the loop and not passing on specific warnings from Indian intelligence about Zahran’s plans. The two have been bickering for months — after an uneasy period of coalition, President Sirisena attempted to remove the Prime Minister from office late last year, setting off a constitutional crisis that was resolved only with the intervention of the Supreme Court.

While both men claimed they were attempting to pull together in the wake of the bombings, the country is essentially operating parallel governments. Offices of the Prime Minister and the President hold separate security meetings, brief against each other, and issue competing narratives as both attempt to lay blame the other for the repeated failures to prevent the Easter Sunday tragedy.

Scores of people have been detained since parliament approved sweeping emergency powers for the police and military, and the president has vowed that every house on the island will be searched.

In the week since the attacks, Raids are continuing on suspected bomb-making factories and safe houses in the east of the island.

At St. Anthony’s on Saturday, the wooden pews remained piled up on the road next to the church as workers removed the last of the debris from inside. Men in Wellington boots and hard hats were hosing down the walls with jets of foamy water from high-pressure fire hoses.

“This is to clean off the spots of blood,” Father Jude Fernando, the priest in charge of St Anthony’s, told Al Jazeera, looking as if he had not slept all week.

The workers, deployed by the Sri Lankan navy, washed the street outside the shrine in preparation for a visit on Sunday by President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Black and white streamers have fluttered across the street since Sunday in remembrance of those who lost their lives. Above alleyways and on street corners, flower-filled shrines to St. Anthony have long watched over the tightly-knit community of Hindus, Christians, Muslims and Buddhists.

10 civilians and 6 suspected terrorists killed in police raid on Friday

On Friday night, 10 civilians — including six children — were killed along with six suspected terrorists after a shootout between police and alleged militants in the town of Sainthamaruthu on Sri Lanka’s eastern coast.

At daybreak Saturday, a gruesome scene was revealed at the raided house — charred bodies and a roof blown off during three explosions.

One of the militants killed in that raid has been identified as Mohamed Niyas, a prominent member of the local extremist group National Tawheed Jamath and Mathaniya’s brother-in-law.

“It did not hit me until I saw the bodies of the men and women. When they said six children, I thought whether they could be the people related to me,” Mathaniya told CNN.

“Among the women, there were five women there in the house. The wives of my three brothers, my younger sister, and my mother. There were altogether seven children.”

Witnesses told CNN one explosion during the raid turned the Sainthamaruthu house “into fire.”

Mathaniya said her brother Zahran Hashim’s wife and daughter are currently in the hospital. Police confirmed that after Friday’s house raid, a woman and child with life-threatening injuries were taken to hospital.

Speaking to CNN on Saturday, Mathaniya said she identified her brother from photographs of his body parts at the police station earlier in the week.

Earlier Friday, authorities had seized a large cache of explosives, 100,000 ball bearings and ISIS uniforms and flags from a garage a few miles from the raided property, CNN told.

 

Read more from Shafaqna:

US Muslims raise funds for Sri Lanka victims

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