Colombo: Sri Lanka's Muslim community should not be blamed for the Easter Sunday suicide bombings that authorities have blamed on a local Muslim group, the Archbishop of Colombo said on Thursday.
Malcolm Cardinal Ranjit said that Muslim politicians and others from the community had offered their condolences and said they had nothing to do with the Sunday horror that killed 359 people and injured hundreds.
The Archbishop was referring to the strong condemnation of the tragic incident by Sri Lanka Muslim Congress and Muslim Council of Sri Lanka - two reperesentatives bodies of the Muslim in the Island. Besides them, Muslim World League (MWL), Saudi Arabia, UAE, Pakistan and other Muslim nations too had joined the world community to condemn the barbaric incident.
"Hence, I am of the opinion that the Muslim community had absolutely nothing to do with these attacks," the Daily Mirror newspaper quoted him as saying.
But the Archbishop said he could not fathom why the Catholic community was subjected to such atrocities.
"I have been personally open and friendly towards the Muslim community as we share a common ancestor in Abraham," Cardinal Ranjith said.
"However, the reason why they chose us would emerge in the future", he said.
He said that members of the Muslim community had met him at Inter-Religious Council meetings where they expressed their condolences and insisted they had no connection with what transpired on Easter Sunday. Addressing the media, he said the government should have told him "if they knew something was about to take place".
"In such an event", he said, "The community would have cancelled all the masses and services during the Holy Week."
He was referring to published reports that Sri Lanka had been warned by intelligence agencies about possible terror attacks during Easter but the warnings were ignored.
A total of 359 people, majority of them Christians, when six bombers attacked three Churches and as many five star hotels on Easter Sunday that coincided with April 21, 2019.
While no group claimed responsibility for the bloodbath, the government said that the National Thowheed Jamath (NTJ), a Sri Lankan Muslim group, carried out the attacks, stunning the island nation that had not seen such gore since the end of the civil war a decade ago.
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