The U.S. had no advance knowledge concerning a series of deadly bombings that struck Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, killing hundreds of people, including several American citizens, the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka said Wednesday.
Ambassador Alaina Teplitz said that the U.S. did not have “any prior knowledge” of the attacks, despite claims from local authorities that both Sri Lankan and foreign government officials knew of the activities of ISIS-linked extremists in the area, according to The Associated Press.
{mosads}“I can tell you definitively we were not warned and we did not have any prior knowledge of this,” Teplitz said. “We did not know because believe me, if we had, we would have tried to do something about it.”
“The Sri Lankans themselves have said they received information, and they had their own lapses that resulted in a failure to either mitigate or warn. So that’s incredibly tragic,” Teplitz said.
The scale of the attacks, she added, pointed to the likelihood that local ISIS fighters were receiving aid from abroad.
“If you look at the scale of the attacks, the level of coordination, again, the sophistication of them, it’s not implausible to think there are foreign linkages,” Teplitz said, according to the AP, adding that the U.S. believes that “the terrorist plotting is ongoing.”
Sunday’s attacks killed 359 people attending Easter services around the capital, while one blast also targeted a hotel frequented by foreign tourists. ISIS militants have since claimed responsibility for the attack.
Sri Lanka’s president announced after the attacks that he would replace the country’s defense minister, accusing officials of failing to act on warnings about the attacks.
“I will completely restructure the police and security forces in the coming weeks. I expect to change the heads of defense establishments within next 24 hours,” President Maithripala Sirisena said.
“The security officials who got the intelligence report from a foreign nation did not share it with me,” he added. “Appropriate actions would have been taken. I have decided to take stern action against these officials.”