Who to believe, the BBC or Agence France-Presse (AFP)?
According to the BBC:
The nature of the blasts was not immediately clear and there were no immediate claims of responsibility.
But documents seen by AFP show that Sri Lanka's police chief Pujuth Jayasundara issued an intelligence alert to top officers 10 days ago, warning that suicide bombers planned to hit "prominent churches".
"A foreign intelligence agency has reported that the NTJ (National Thowheeth Jama'ath) is planning to carry out suicide attacks targeting prominent churches as well as the Indian high commission in Colombo," the alert said.
The NTJ is a radical Muslim group in Sri Lanka that was linked last year to the vandalisation of Buddhist statues.
Typical BBC "Smother and Smoothe" operation in full swing as I type. Firstly - hide behind the old "No one has claimed responsibility" tag for as long as possible...We will be watching this closely to see how coverage compares with other recent attacks. Secondly muddy the waters with prominent "explainers" that leave the casual website user confused. Avoid the I, M and J words as much as possible.
ReplyDeleteAvoid I & M words, but do take the precaution of ensuring that the one blood donor quoted has a Muslim name!
DeleteThe Indian offshoot of CNN has been putting (Muslim) names to two of the terrorists for hours, but they seem to be the only ones.
Deletehttps://twitter.com/CNNnews18/status/1119854980205146112
https://twitter.com/CNNnews18/status/1119873647387086849
The BBC expert on this morning's 'Sunday' on Radio 4 was positing the idea that it might be the Tamil Tigers!
ReplyDeleteEmily Buchanan: Do you have any idea who might be behind these attacks?
Ethirajan Anbarasan: It is still not clear who could be responsible for these blasts but it happens almost 10 years after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, the bitter civil war which ended in May 2009 in which tens of thousands of people were killed. And after that war the Tamil Tigers, according to the government, were totally eliminated. There have been bomb blasts in Sri Lanka during the civil war in the 1990s and also 15 years ago, but the government always maintained that The Tamil Tigers were totally defeated and we don't see them coming out with any statement and any from Sri Lanka or even from outside.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0004dx6
A prediction: When the BBC's US reporters wake up and catch on to the Sri Lanka story, they'll probably be mostly tweeting about Donald Trump deleting and re-issuing a tweet.
ReplyDeleteNihal Arthanayake's twitter account is something to behold...
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/TherealNihal
He seems to have appointed himself God, sorry, "Head of Global News Management for All Humanity".
He also claims to have better news sources (random tweets) about what's being going on in Sri Lanka than AFP.
Yes we knew the man was a fool. Now we know, if we didn't already, that he is a fool with a planet-sized - no, make that "cosmos-sized" - ego.