• Tweeter
  • republish

Investigators inspect the church of Negombo, one of the sites affected by the attacks, on April 21, 2019. REUTERS / Stringer NO ARCHIVES. NO RESALES. TEMPLATE OUT

In Sri Lanka, the heads are falling into the upper echelons of the state two months after the bloody Easter attacks. Former police chief and former senior defense ministry official accused of "serious crimes against humanity" for failing to halt preparations for series of bomb attacks by police jihadist group, which killed 258 people. The Sri Lankan president continues to be accused of being the first person responsible for this failure of the intelligence services.

With our correspondent in New Delhi, Antoine Guinard

Political quarrels never end in Sri Lanka to determine who are the ones who have failed in their fight against Islamist terrorism. The two main defendants, ex-police chief Pujith Jayasundara and former Defense Secretary Hemasiri Fernando, point fingers to the country's president Maithripala Sirisena.

They accuse Mr. Sirisena of not having taken seriously the jihadist threat, despite very precise information, notably from the Indian services in early April, about imminent attacks.

On June 12, a former governor of Sri Lanka accused the intelligence services of protecting the National Thowheeth Jama'ath (NTJ), the local Islamist group, behind the attacks of April 21 , with whom he was cooperating.

But Maithripala Sirisena is doing everything to sabotage the work of the parliamentary committee set up to investigate these attacks. For its part, the opposition hopes to succeed. It says that it is the blatant rivalry between the president and the prime minister that has led to the inefficiency of the intelligence services and the fight against terrorism.