What We Know and Don’t Know About the Sri Lanka Attacks – The New York Times

• One of the suicide bombers was arrested a few months ago on suspicion of having vandalized a statue of Buddha, a highly provocative act in Sri Lanka, a Buddhist-majority island nation in the Indian Ocean.

• In Washington, intelligence and counterterrorism analysts were scrutinizing possible ties between the Islamic State and the attackers, but as of Monday afternoon had not reached any definitive conclusions.

What we know about who was killed and where

• The attacks took place at three churches and three hotels on Sunday morning in three separate cities across the island. Two more explosions happened in the afternoon in and around Colombo, one at a small guesthouse and the other at what was the suspects’ apparent safe house. Three officers searching for the attackers were killed in that blast.

• The deadliest of the explosions appeared to be at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo, about 20 miles north of Colombo, where at least 104 were killed.

• At least 28 people were killed at the Zion Church in Batticaloa, on the other side of the island on its eastern coast. St. Anthony’s Shrine, a Roman Catholic church in Colombo, was also attacked with an unknown number of dead. Witnesses described “a river of blood” there.

• In addition to the Shangri-La, the Cinnamon Grand and the Kingsbury hotels, also in Colombo, were attacked.

• At least 36 of the dead were foreigners, several of them American, the authorities said. Others were British, Chinese, Dutch, Indian, Portuguese, Japanese and Turkish citizens, according to officials and news reports.