The investigation goes ahead, two days after the attacks that targeted Sunday churches and luxury hotels in Sri Lanka, leaving more than 320 dead and 500 wounded. While authorities attributed these acts to the local Islamist National Thowheeth Jama'ath (NTJ) Islamist movement, they were claimed Tuesday by the Islamic State Jihadist organization, directing the investigations into the importance of foreign influence on suicide bombers. And prefiguring a network that exceeds the communitarian tensions of the country.
>>> ESSENTIAL - Sri Lanka: ISIS claims attacks, no French among victims
Radical Islam, an element "completely new". Since Sunday and in the absence of claim, the specialists could only note the unpublished aspect of these attacks, among the most deadly since September 11th. In a country emerging from the civil war in May 2009, but still marked by ethnic rivalries, clashes had recently erupted between the majority Sinhalese Buddhist community and the Muslim minority. Last year, the authorities even declared a twelve-day state of emergency to end riots against Muslims in the center of the country. But Christians, representing 7% of the population, did not seem to be a target. Questioned on the trail of an attack from radical Islam, Jean-Vincent Brisset, director of research at Iris (Institute of International and Strategic Relations) referred to an element "quite new" on Monday on Europe 1.
"A coordinated attack of this magnitude does not bear the signature of the ethnic violence initiated by the Muslim community in Sri Lanka", added researcher Gerrit Kurtz, specialist of the country, to RFI. "For decades, there have been attacks on churches by Sinhalese gangs who wanted to defend Buddhism against the threat of 'immoral conversion', as they say, of Buddhists by Christians. very small scale events, "said Alan Keenan, project director for International Crisis Group. "These groups are violent, attacking places of worship, burning houses and shouting slogans, but they do not kill 300 people, do not attack foreigners, and even if we do not have all the evidence, What happened on Sunday is more like what we have seen in other countries: attacks by Islamists. "
"How did they produce these bombs?" . The new evidence brought to the inquiry seems to go in this direction. NTJ identification and Daesh claim not contradictory: Confident that it is "hard to see how a small organization in this country can do all this", a spokesman for the Sri Lankan government said Tuesday that the police the country was investigating "possible foreign aid". "How do they train kamikazes, how did they produce these bombs?" The early morning explosions on Sunday were mostly suicide bombings. The investigators have already identified two brothers of 20 and 30 years old, son of a wealthy businessman and head of a "family terrorist cell" that could have maintained links with foreign countries. The two men blew themselves up at Shangri-La and Cinnamon, two luxury beachfront hotels in the capital, Colombo.
The assumption of acts beyond the country's borders was further strengthened on Tuesday, when authorities said the attacks were "in retaliation for the attack on the Muslims of Christchurch", which killed 50 people on March 15 in two mosques in the big city of southern New Zealand. The NTJ had been alerted 10 days ago by the police that it was planning suicide attacks on churches and the embassy in Colombo. But according to the government spokesman, this warning was not sent to the Prime Minister, because, this time, an internal struggle: the head of government is in open conflict with the President of Sri Lanka Lanka, and the police depend on the jurisdiction of the latter.
Sri Lanka, a new front for the Islamic State
According to several analysts, the carnage of Sunday also illustrates the "success" of the strategy of the Islamic State, defeated on the ground in the Middle East, which aims to continue to strike or to strike, in the name of its ideology, in the whole world. On Monday, a Telegram pro-EI account broadcast photos of three of the alleged suicide bombers, one finger raised to the sky, Kalashnikov in the other, under the title: "Three of our commando brothers in Sri Lanka", reported the Site Institute.
The National Thowheeth Jama'ath (NTJ), singled out by the Sri Lankan government, "has no local motives, they want to be part of the global insurgency of the Islamic State," as estimated by AFP Zachary Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington, specializing in jihadist groups in Southeast Asia.