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The Sri Lankan Government has blamed local Jihadi terror group National Thowheed Jamath for the deadly Easter terror attacks.

Cabinet spokesman Rajitha Senaratne said the bombings were carried out with the help of an international network.

The Government also reportedly said it had been warned three times in recent weeks that a possible attack during the holy holiday was imminent before the series of blasts at hotels and churches that killed at least 290 people.

One of the alerts reportedly came 10 minutes before the massacre, which the Government has said was carried out by suicide bombers.

Business Television India reports the Sri Lankan government admitted that a  “friendly country” gave intelligence on April 4 alerting to potential attacks.

However the Government acknowledged it had “failed to act” on the warning.

Indian media reports claim India had attempted to warn its neighbour.

“We do not believe these attacks were carried out by a group of people who were confined to this country,” Senaratne said this morning.

“There was an international network without which these attacks could not have succeeded.”

National Thowheed Jamath are an Islamic group based in Tamil Nadu, India.

The Indian Express reported several sources claimed India had tried to warn Sri Lanka, but the country had been largely shut down for the Sinhala-Tamil new year, Good Friday and Easter.

Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka was at war for decades with ethnic minority Tamil separatists but violence had largely ended since the government victory in the civil war, 10 years ago.

Sri Lanka’s 22 million people include Christian, Muslim and Hindu minority populations.

The country spent nearly three decades mired in a bloody civil war involving Sri Lanka’s predominantly Buddhist Sinhalese majority and mainly Hindu Tamil minority.

The Tamil Tigers fought to create an independent Tamil state in part of the island. The war ended in 2009 after costing an estimated nearly 100,000 lives.

Police have arrested 24 people in the wake of the weekend’s terror attacks. At least eight Brits are among those confirmed dead.

Security forces raided a house in Colombo on Sunday afternoon local time, in the hours after the attack.

Police reported an explosion at the house and said three officers were killed.

They said all 24 people arrested are Sri Lankan.

Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt said earlier this morning there wa0s “lots of speculation at the moment but there is no hard knowledge” about the perpetrators of the atrocity.

“We obviously need to wait for the police in Sri Lanka to do their work,” he said.

The UK would be offering assistance in the days to come.

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/breaking-sri-lanka-attacks-terror-14444559