Colombo, April 13, 2020: Sri Lanka’s Catholic Church has said it had forgiven the suicide bombers behind the attacks that killed at least 279 people last Easter.

“We forgave them,” Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, head of the Catholic Church in the island nation, said April 12 during an Easter Mass – broadcast from a TV studio because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The cardinal, who is also the archbishop of Colombo, also said they have offered “love to the enemies who tried to destroy us.”

He said that instead of retaliating, the Catholic minority of Sri Lanka had contemplated Jesus’s message of hope and reduced tensions.

Nine suicide bombers carried out a series of devastating blasts that tore through three churches and three luxury hotels, killing 279 people and injuring 593 others on the Easter Sunday on April 21, 2019.

It was considered one of the deadliest attacks in the island nation’s history.

“The attackers may have had some anger towards Jesus, but, they caused a big damage to us Catholics and Christians. In those bomb attacks, it is not only the Catholics who died. A lot of others – Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Christian also died,” Cardinal Ranjith said.

The blasts targeted St Anthony’s Church in Colombo, St Sebastian’s Church in the western coastal town of Negombo and a church in the eastern town of Batticaloa when the Easter Sunday mass were in progress.

Three explosions were reported from the five-star hotels – the Shangri-La, the Cinnamon Grand and the Kingsbury in Colombo.

The ISIS terror group claimed the attacks, but the government blamed the local Islamist extremist group National Thawheed Jammath for the bombings.

Last year, Cardinal Ranjith called for the government at-the-time to step down over its alleged failure to investigate an “international conspiracy” behind the attacks.

That government headed by President Maithripala Sirisena, lost November’s elections, with former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s younger brother Gotabaya taking the reins.

Sirisena initially blamed Muslim hardliners for the bombings, but later accused international drug dealers of being behind the attacks – supposedly to destabilize his anti-narcotics drive.

The country’s then-police chief and secretary to the Ministry of Defence have been charged with murder for allegedly not acting on intelligence about the attacks.

Police have arrested 135 people in connection with the bombings, blamed on the National Thowheed Jamath group. They have yet to be charged.

This year’s Easter celebrations have been muted amid a nationwide indefinite curfew imposed to contain the novel coronavirus pandemic.

Some 199 people have been infected, with seven deaths, the government said.

Sources: Agencies