Sri Lanka's president has asked for the resignations of the defense secretary and national police chief, a dramatic internal shake-up after security forces shrugged off intelligence reports warning of possible attacks before Easter bombings that killed over 350 people, the president's office said Wednesday.

Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe claimed he and other top government officials were not told about a possible threat and told local media “we must look into why adequate precautions were not taken.”

Sri Lanka’s Christians have a long history that reflects the dynamics of colonialism as well as present-day ethnic and religious tensions.

The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops termed as "a great evil" the Easter terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka targeting the country's minority Christian community as worshippers packed three churches.

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,

Unless we remove all of the people, we will never produce a sinless church, one that pursues the good without also perpetrating some evil.