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Ambassador: US had no prior knowledge of Sri Lanka threat

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The U. S. had no prior knowledge of the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka that killed over 350 people, the American ambassador said Wednesday, despite…
The U. S. had no prior knowledge of the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka that killed over 350 people, the American ambassador said Wednesday, despite local claims that foreign officials had been warned an attack was looming.
As the investigation into Sunday’s Islamic State-claimed attack continues, FBI agents and U. S. military personnel are in Sri Lanka assisting the probe, Ambassador Alaina Teplitz said.
While declining to say whether U. S. officials had intelligence on the local extremists and their leader who allegedly carried out the assault, Teplitz said America remained concerned over militants at large.
She also said that “clearly there was some failure in the system” that caused Sri Lankan officials to fail to share the warnings they received prior to the attack.
“I can tell you definitively we were not warned and we did not have any prior knowledge of this,” Teplitz told foreign journalists from her office at the U. S. Embassy in Colombo. “We did not know because believe me, if we had, we would have tried to do something about it.”
Sunday’s bombings ripped through Christian worshippers at church celebrating Easter and at hotels in Sri Lanka, an island nation off the southern tip of India. The attacks killed at least 359 people and wounded some 500 others, marking Sri Lanka’s worst violence since its 26-year civil war ended a decade ago.

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