Ramesh Dharuka remembers the 2019 Easter bombings as if they happened only yesterday. He was barely seven years old at the time, but the memory refills with each passing year, gleaning details and bringing forth new ones with every commemoration. As yet another anniversary of the Easter terror attacks in Sri Lanka, Dharuka looks back on the day he ran home without realizing that he was bleeding.
“I went to church with my sister to celebrate Easter. While we were offering prayers, we heard some voices and I saw my sister screaming and falling. I got scared and ran in search of my parents. I didn’t know until I got home that I was bleeding. I told my mother that there was an explosion in the church. Then he told me it should be fireworks,” 10-year-old Ramesh Dharuka told News18.com.
His sister Sneha Mindani was among those injured in Sunday’s Easter attacks. She remained in the intensive care unit of the hospital for six months. A metal piece was pierced into his skull, which was operated on several times and often left open for some time. She was kept in a special procedure room and her parents could barely see her for six months.
While Sneha narrowly escaped, there were scores (by many accounts 280 people have died) who were killed in the series of attacks on April 21, 2019.
Indica, who lost one of her daughters in the bombings, said 13-year-old Kanishk Hirushi suffered injuries, while another 8-year-old Tharushi Prabodh narrowly escaped when she bent down to tie her shoelaces at the church. Indica told that when they were trying to escape, his wife fainted and only then they came to know that her stomach was swollen. “We had to take him to the hospital. That’s when we found out that his liver had split in two. There are still two metals in his body and those that cannot be removed. He has to endure pain for the rest of his life.”
Eight-year-old Tharushi is still in shock when the blast happened. She has been unable to cope since the attacks. For almost a year, he locked himself in the room. It took him a long time to slowly recover from the trauma.
“All we did was we went to our place of worship but came back with a dead body. What did we do to deserve it? My wife could not even attend the last rites of our daughter as she was still in the ICU.”
Horror stories go deeper than this. A family lost an eight-month-old baby in the attack. The mother was seen carrying her son out of the bombing site, his body lying in a pool of wounds on his face. Unable to cope with the loss of their son, the couple then left for Italy.
Memories of the Easter bombings are being refreshed at the Galle Face protest site in Colombo, where a prominent Sinhalese crowd has been demanding the removal of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa for more than a week.
There is also a demand for justice, trial and punishment against the culprits of the attack amidst the tears filled with memories. “We do not know who was behind the chain of bomb blasts. It’s been three years and the killers are roaming freely. We want that a case should be registered against the perpetrators,” said Akash, one of the organizers of the memorial meeting.
In addition to 280 deaths, more than 500 were injured after a group of suicide bombers carried out blasts at churches and top hotels in Sri Lanka. Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the Archbishop of Colombo, said in his address to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in March this year that the massacre was part of a “grand political ploy” and called on the United Nations to investigate the origins and motivations behind the Easter Sunday attacks. requested. ,
The Easter Sunday bombings were the deadliest violence Sri Lanka has seen since the end of the civil war in 2009.
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