Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena has said country\u2019s intelligence services believe the Easter Sunday suicide bombers had very clear links to ISIS. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
President said in an interview to a news channel that \nthe terror group had provided training to the perpetrators of last \nweek\u2019s attacks, and that links between ISIS and extremists in Sri Lanka \ncould be traced back to 15 years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
President had earlier said that\n there could be upto 140 ISIS sympathisers in the country and hunt is on\n to nab them all. Sirisena rejected claims that he should resign in the \nface of the intelligence failures before the attacks, which killed more \nthan 250 people including 42 foreigners. The President blamed officials \nand ministers in his government for failing to act on warnings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He\n also rejected criticism that a political rift with his Prime Minister \nhad created a governmental void which paved the way for terrorist \nattacks to take place. Sirisena said when it comes to national \nsecurity, there are no party differences, religious differences or \nracial differences between us as Sri Lankans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meanwhile, a joint \noperations command has been set up in Colombo for coordination among all\n army, navy, air force and police areas within the country for \noperational purposes with immediate effect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The command will \nbegin its functions under the chief of defence staff with immediate \neffect. President Sirsen has appointed a former army commander as new \nDefense Secretary while police chief has been sent on compulsory leave \nfollowing Easter Sundacks in the country.\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena has said country\u2019s intelligence services believe the Easter Sunday suicide bombers had very clear links to ISIS. President said in an interview to a news channel that the terror group had provided training to the perpetrators of last week\u2019s attacks, and that links between ISIS and extremists in Sri Lanka […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60291,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60290"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60292,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60290\/revisions\/60292"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}