Sri Lankan defense minister resigns and security continues arrests

Sri Lanka's Defense Minister Himasiri Fernando has announced his resignation, saying he is responsible for Sunday's suicide bombings on Easter and left some 359 dead and 500 wounded.

The defense minister told Reuters he did not fail but he was responsible for the failures of some of the institutions he headed as defense minister.

He also said that the security services were responding effectively to intelligence information about the possibility of attacks before they occur. "We were working on it, all these devices were working on it."

Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe admitted in a private interview with Al-Jazeera that he had failed to gather security information about the attack, stressing the government's intention to ensure that it did not fail again in terms of what he called "sleeper cells."

Wickremesing said that there was no complicity with the perpetrators, but there was negligence, stressing the pursuit of investigation to detect the shortcomings of security.

"We have to accept that there is a great failure in the communications," he said. "The intelligence warnings we received were heard when the attack took place."

Arrests
Sri Lankan authorities on Thursday arrested a father of suicide bombers who had been involved in the attacks. "The competent authorities have arrested the father of two suicide bombers on suspicion of helping them in the bloody bombings," the former commander of the Sri Lankan navy said without giving further details.

The Catholic churches in Sri Lanka will remain closed until security conditions prevail, and a local church official told Agence France-Presse that "upon the recommendation of the security forces, all churches will remain closed."

"There will be no mass until further notice," he said.

In a parallel context, sources told Agence France-Presse that India had warned Sri Lanka of the possibility of suicide attacks weeks before the Easter attacks on the basis of "threats" linked to the organization of the Islamic state obtained from suspects under arrest.

New Delhi has adopted warnings of elements, including videos seized during raids in 2018, during which seven men were arrested in the city of Coimbatore in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, according to the Indian media.

The seven men are suspected of links to the state organization that adopted Sri Lanka's attacks, with Colombo accusing a local Islamic group, the National Tawheed Group, of being behind the attacks.