Sri Lanka PM: Country must prepare for new terrorism phase

Sri Lanka’s prime minister told a parliamentary committee investigating the Islamic State-inspired Easter Sunday bomb attacks that the country should prepare itself for new types of terrorism.
Existing policing, investigative agencies and laws had experience with ethnic Tamil separatists during Sri Lanka’s civil war, but Sri Lanka must now deal with “a new phase of terrorism,” Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe in his explanation for what the government should do following criticism that the it failed to act on intelligence from foreign agencies before the attacks that killed more than 250 people.
“The terrorism we see today doesn’t have a central organization, there is no need to conduct classes to recruit people. People join through web sites,” he said.
He added: “A team can come and attack […] or it can be done by one person if he makes up his mind to drive a lorry and kill 10 people.”
Wickremesinghe said that he proposed to the Cabinet and obtained a report from members to draft new laws to deal with people who travel to fight in foreign wars and who have gone to terrorist training centers. The laws will be based on British laws drafted from the 2000s until now, Wickremesinghe said.
“The whole existence of the internet and the web has made a big difference, this is a sort of phenomena of the last 10 years. Not only us, throughout the world, they are facing how to deal with this? Some countries have offered to help us, UK and Singapore,” Wickremesinghe said. Krishan Francis, Colombo, AP