Colombo, Apr 17 (PTI) Over 200 Catholic devotees who lost their lives in the Easter suicide bombings in 2019 would be honoured as "heroes of faith", head of the local church Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith said here on Wednesday.
As many as 270 people, including 11 Indians, were killed on April 21, 2019, when nine suicide bombers belonging to the local Islamist extremist group National Thawheed Jamaat (NTJ) linked to ISIS carried out a series of blasts that tore through three churches and as many luxury hotels in Sri Lanka.
Ranjith said, “Those who attended churches on the day didn’t expect to get killed and their bodies to be taken home”.
He said signatures of the Catholic minority under the diocese of Colombo would be collected in the campaign to recognise the victims as "heroes of faith".
“This will also give the Easter attack an international appeal because once we declare the victims as 'heroes of faith', the international community will come to recognise them more and it will become an international issue,” Ranjith said.
He again attacked the government, both at the time in 2019 and the current, for not being able to carry out a proper investigation to deliver justice to the victims.
“Till now those in power during and after the Easter attack have not done anything substantial to discover who was behind the bombings," Ranjith said.
Maithripala Sirisena, 72, was president between 2015 January and 2019 November.
Sirisena was accused and found guilty in a special presidential panel he appointed as the country’s president. The findings blamed him for inaction on the prior intelligence received on the attacks.
Later, he was ordered to pay Sri Lankan rupee 100 million to the relatives of the victims of the attack as compensation. He has so far paid only a part of it.
The government says the investigation into the bombings is still on with arrests of several hundreds.