Just what leads to criminal thoughts of terrifying fellow humans by committing heinous crimes such as blowing people up in peaces is the question many often ask after the evil is perpetrated.
A Sri Lankan government official says coordinated suicide bombings in the island nation on Easter Sunday, which killed more than 320 people, were carried out in retaliation for last month’s mass shooting at mosques in New Zealand.
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The state minister for defense, Ruwan Wijewardene, said the attacks were carried out by two Islamist organizations. As NPR’s Lauren Frayer reports, “it’s not immediately clear how he knows that – whether the information comes from suspects being interrogated, or evidence the suicide bombers may have left behind.”
One of the organizations is a little-known radical Islamist group named National Thowfeek Jamaath. Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne has called for the top police official to resign after failing to stop the attacks despite receiving reports that the group was planning to target churches, an international daily reports.
A police officer escorts a man away from a mosque in central Christchurch, New Zealand
At least 49 people were killed and 20 seriously injured in mass shootings at two mosques in the New Zealand city of Christchurch on a Friday last month, in a carefully planned and unprecedented atrocity that shocked the usually peaceful nation.
The attack was unleashed at lunchtime local time Friday when mosques were full of worshippers.
Footage of the massacre was streamed live online, and a rambling manifesto laced with white supremacist references was published just before the shootings unfolded.