A Sri Lankan cardinal on Thursday slammed his country's government for not preventing the Easter Sunday attacks at two churches and five hotels that killed more than 250 people.
Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, Archbishop of Colombo, Sri Lanka, noted that security officials had been warned multiple times about the threat of terror attacks.
"The government of Sri Lanka was informed about this attack on April 4th by the Indian secret service," Ranjith said at a Rome press conference, according to the website Crux.
"If I had known that there was an attack planned, I would have emptied all the churches and told the people to go home," Ranjith said. "They did not do anything about it. In fact the people arrested were released by the Sri Lanka government and this whole episode was forgotten."
The cardinal said he never thought Muslims were behind the April 21 attacks, but that it was "someone with global political interests."
"For this reason, I asked Catholics, and Buddhists and everyone else, to not raise their hands against our Muslim brothers, because it was clear that the Muslim community had nothing to do with this," he said.
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