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At least two of the suicide bombers had law degrees. Two were brothers from a wealthy Colombo family, one of whom attended university in the United Kingdom and earned a postgraduate degree in Australia. There were nine of them altogether, eight men and a woman. Most were “well-educated and come from (the) middle or upper-middle class,” Ruwan Wijewardene, Sri Lanka’s deputy defence minister, told reporters.

There is still much to piece together from what happened on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka, about why the authorities did not respond to specific and actionable intelligence about an imminent jihadist attack, how it could be that clear warnings to and from Sri Lanka’s deputy inspector general went unheeded, and what were the names, even, of the terrorists. But this much can be said about them.

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The atrocities they committed do not constitute some understandable if misguided act of resistance to Western imperialist hegemony. This was not an eruption of “blowback” for the trespasses of Zionists or American oil companies, as one routinely hears whenever the blood of innocents is spilled at a bus stop in Jerusalem, or on the streets of London, or at a nightclub in Paris. These were not “chickens coming home to roost,” as it was fashionable to say, over and over again, in the days and months and years following the atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001.