A bearded man wearing a heavy backpack and sandals walks deliberately across the courtyard of St. Sebastian’s Church in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday. Moments later, he slips past the pews where women are sitting with their hair covered in veils of white lace, then detonates a bomb. The explosion that followed — one of numerous blasts unleashed by eight suicide bombers at six sites in three cities — was strong enough to blow the tiles off the church roof. More than 350 people died in the coordinated attacks, which were believed to have been carried out by a local cell that had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. That would make it one of the deadliest attacks carried out by the group, nearly three times as lethal as the 2015 Paris attacks and second only to the 2016 bombing of the Karrada market in Baghdad that killed 382 people.

Source: International New York Times April 25, 2019 16:22 UTC