A total of 269 people were killed, including at least 45 foreign nationals, and at least 500 were injured in a series of coordinated Islamist terrorist suicide bombings targeting three churches and three luxury hotels in Sri Lanka on this day in 2019. The church bombings were carried out during Easter services in Negombo, Batticaloa and Colombo; the hotels that were bombed were the Shangri-La, Cinnamon Grand, Kingsbury. Later an explosion was also recorded at Tropical Inn in Dehiwala, a Colombo suburb.
According to Sri Lankan government officials, all eight of the suicide bombers in the attacks were Sri Lankan citizens associated with National Thowheeth Jama’ath, a local militant Islamist group with suspected foreign ties. On 23 April 2019, Amaq News Agency, a propaganda outlet for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), stated that ″the perpetrators of the attack targeting the citizens of coalition countries and Christians in Sri Lanka were Islamic State fighters″. Sri Lanka was not part of the anti-ISIL coalition, and the overwhelming majority of those killed were Sri Lankan citizens. The Criminal Investigation Department, however, has stated that there is no evidence of ISIL’s direct involvement.
-Wikipedia