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Colombo: Suicide attacks and a series of terror blasts on ripped through churches and top grade hotels in Sri Lanka, killing 215 people and wounding hundreds of others in Sunday Easter.

The casualty figure could go up.

The blasts targeted St Anthony’s Church in Colombo, Zion Church in Batticalo, in eastern Sri Lanka, and St Sebastian’s Church in the western coastal town of Negombo around 8.45 a.m. (local time) when the Easter mass was in progress.

Blasts were also reported at Shangri-La, the Kingsbury and the Cinnamon Grand- all five star hotels in Colombo.

While the death toll was 207, as confirmed officially, the casualty figure had risen to 215, according to news reports.

Eleven of the 27 foreign nationals killed in the coordinated attacks had been identified till late this evening. Among the dead, at the National Hospital are an Indian, two Chinese and one each from Poland, Denmark, Japan, Pakistan, America, Morocco and Bangladesh .

No group has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack but it is believed that a single group is behind this dastardly attack.

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Newsroom24x7.com is edited by Lalit Shastri. He is is an Indian journalist, columnist, wildlife film maker, birder, and environmentalist. He is a former Principal Correspondent of The Hindu and a Special Correspondent of The Asian Age - two of India's leading English newspapers. He quit a corporate job to investigate the causes leading to the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster and subsequently became a full-time journalist. He has extensively covered from ground zero for The Hindu, the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya and repeated attacks by Naxalite-Maoists in the Central Indian States of Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh. View all posts by Newsroom24x7 Network