Sri Lanka Bombings Live Update: Blasts Unleash Carnage at Churches and Luxury Hotels

At least six explosions targeting churches and hotels around Sri Lanka were said to have killed almost 200 people on Sunday in what the police said was a coordinated attack.

• The blasts happened at about 8:45 a.m. at three churches celebrating Easter Mass: St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, the capital; St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, about 20 miles north of Colombo; and Zion Church in the eastern city of Batticaloa. There were also explosions at three five-star hotels in Colombo: the Shangri-La, the Cinnamon Grand and the Kingsbury.

• A health official at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka said that the death toll was 189 so far. Eleven foreigners are among the dead, she said.

• It was not immediately clear who was responsible. A senior presidential aide said it appeared that the attacks had been carried out by suicide bombers.

Radical extremism has grown in Sri Lanka

Experts in India said that the attacks had most likely been carried out by radical Islamist groups based in Sri Lanka or elsewhere in South Asia.

“It looks like one of the local Islamist groups which is affiliated with the Islamic State,” said Sameer Patil, a national security fellow at Gateway House, a foreign policy research group in Mumbai.

Mr. Patil noted that the Islamic State had a history of staging attacks against Christians on Christian holy days, notably Christmas and Easter.

He said that some radicalized Muslims had traveled from Sri Lanka to Syria to fight in that country’s civil war. The Islamic State’s recent loss of its last patch of territory in Syria makes it even more likely that foreign fighters there from countries like Sri Lanka may now be returning home, he added.

For Sri Lanka, Mr. Patil said, “it was just a matter of time before that would hit them on their own soil.”

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, said that radical Islamist groups had been quietly growing in influence for years in Sri Lanka, in the nearby Indian state of Tamil Nadu and in the nearby island nation of the Maldives.

Mr. Chellaney said that it was unexpected that the attackers had the confidence to raid hotels in Sri Lanka, saying that the island’s hotels had tried to provide tight security during the island’s civil war and ever since. “Hotels are on guard in Sri Lanka, so I’m surprised that three hotels still came under target,” he said.

Buddhist statues were defaced last year in Sri Lanka in what appears to have been an iconoclastic attack by Muslims, he said. In the Maldives, radical Muslims destroyed Buddhist archaeological finds in early 2012 at the country’s National Museum.

World leaders condemned the attack

In a Twitter post, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe of Sri Lanka denounced the assaults and urged the public not to spread misinformation, which has fueled the country’s sectarian divide in the past.