The familiar media narrative when reporting on serial killers is that, “No one suspected a thing”.

When it comes to Islamic terrorists, it’s also usually, “No one suspected a thing”. But in reality, no one was paying attention.

There was a history of violence. A slow process of building up to a horrific act of terror. But the warning signs were ignored.

The massacre of Christians in Sri Lanka had warning signs going back to 2004.

When the Wahhabis came, with their austere ideology and abundant coffers, the town of Kattankudy yielded fertile ground… It was here in Kattankudy’s warren of homes decorated with delicate swirls of Arabic calligraphy that Zaharan Hashim, the man accused of masterminding the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka, grew up. And it was here that he preached his ideology, calling for the killing of nonbelievers in Islam and even other Muslims… The Sri Lankan police say that at least two of the suicide bombers involved in the attacks, which killed at least 250 people, were from Kattankudy. The Islamic State claimed responsibility… It was in the 1980s that Kattankudy, one of the few almost exclusively Muslim towns in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka, began blossoming into a center of Islamic life. The town was enriched by Saudi money for mosques and madrasas, work-abroad contracts and university scholarships… There are more than 60 mosques in Kattankudy for a population of 45,000, and most now subscribe to conservative strains of Islam, including Wahhabism. At the New Kattankudy Grand Jumma Mosque, designed as a replica of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, construction workers are laying intricate blue mosaics as part of the town’s mosque-building boom…

I’ve snipped out the various claims of Islamic irresponsibility.

The bottom line is that Kattankudy was a majority Muslim town. Its mosques were tilted toward Jihad with the complicity of the Sri Lankan government.

In an appeal to the Muslim community that supported his government, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s former president and an unabashed Buddhist nationalist, came to lay the cornerstone of the Kattankudy Grand Jumma Mosque. Saudi diplomats visited, too. The Saudis and others from the gulf also supported a plan by M.L.A.M. Hizbullah, a Kattankudy native who is now governor of Eastern Province, to open an Islamic-inspired university campus in his hometown. But a dearth of land in its densely populated neighborhoods meant that the university, a vast edifice of domes and mosaics that is one of the biggest buildings in the province, is being built farther north.