A DePauw associate professor whose sabbatical trip to Sri Lanka has been put on hold in the wake of suicide bombings that killed nearly 300 people and wounded more than 500 says Sri Lankan security forces’ failure to act on a warning of the attacks is a “completely shocking failure of intelligence.”
Deepa Prakash, an associate professor of political science, is in New Delhi and planned to travel to Sri Lanka in about a week, where she was going to conduct interviews with think tank staff members, academics, diplomats and other policy experts on Sri Lankan foreign policy in South Asia. She responded via email to questions posed by The Boulder.
The Sri Lankan government said that its security forces received a warning from a radical Islamist group at least 10 days before the Easter Sunday bombings at churches and hotels but that the warning did not reach top government officials.
“While I am glad they owned up to this completely shocking failure of intelligence and taking action on it, the cost is simply too huge,” Prakash writes. “No one should be absolved of having this kind of warning and failing to act on it. It is one thing to try your best and to fail to prevent an attack; it is another thing to fail to share intelligence with key leaders, to be so complacent and to sit on so much information.
“If this turns out indeed to have happened the way critics allege it did, it is shocking and adds another layer to the tragedy.”
Though 24 people have been arrested in connection with the attacks, the motive is unclear. Bombings occurred at three Christian churches, as well as other sites, in a country that is less than 10% Christian; about 70% of the country’s population is Buddhist.
The Islamist group identified by Sri Lankan government officials, National Thowheeth Jama’ath, has been known to vandalize Buddhist statues but not to carry out terrorist attacks.
“It is indeed a puzzle and at odds with the history of violence and terrorism on the island,” Prakash writes. “In many ways, this is an unprecedented attack in terms of the scale, the numbers of casualties and the target selection.”
It could be that an extremist group wishes to stoke religious violence or retaliate for perceived injustices by the majority Buddhist population, she says. Some speculate that the attacks were in retaliation for the attacks in March on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. “Or,” Prakash says, “it could be part of a larger ideological plan based on groups like the Islamic State that have been making inroads in South Asia.”
Prakash, who studies international security, political violence and terrorism, has focused on Sri Lanka in her research. She lived in the country as a high school student, when her father was posted there as an Indian diplomat.
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