Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the archbishop of Colombo, said that he has no faith in the investigations to date—one by a commission and one by a committee—into the April 23 attack.

Since the end of the nation's 26-year civil war, in which the Tamil Tigers, a rebel group from the ethnic Tamil minority, sought independence from ethnic Sinhala Buddhist majority Sri Lanka, the country has seen sporadic ethnic and religious violence, but the scale of Sunday's bloodshed recalled the worst days of the war,