This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/world/asia/sri-lanka-victims.html

The article has changed 12 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 6 Version 7
Victims of Sri Lanka Attacks: Who They Were The Victims of the Sri Lanka Terror Attacks
(1 day later)
As Sri Lankans began mass burials on a national day of mourning on Tuesday, the true toll of Sunday’s attacks started to come into focus. Families celebrating a holiday and newlyweds toasting their new lives. Professionals and laborers, students and grandparents, Sri Lankans and foreigners. The coordinated attacks on Sri Lankan hotels and churches on Easter Sunday brought to a sudden, brutal end the lives of more than 350 people.
Family members, government officials and news reports have offered the first glimpses of the people who lost their lives, including mothers, fathers, workers, honeymooners and children. The number of dead was at least 321 on Tuesday, the vast majority Sri Lankans. Among the dead were a family of five who were attending Mass as they did most Sundays. On Tuesday, their family held a joint funeral, the coffins of a mother, father, their two young daughters and infant son lined up in a row.
Officials have confirmed that citizens from at least a dozen countries, including at least four people from the United States, were killed in the attacks. Some of their names have begun to emerge in the international news media. We will update this article as we learn more about the people who died. These are the victims of the Sri Lanka attacks.
[Follow the latest updates on the bombing and the response here.] Danadari Kuruppuachchi, 36, of Sri Lanka, was a manager at a clothing manufacturer, and regularly posted photos of her smiling family on social media. She and her husband, Clode Eshan Rangana Fernando, 41, had been married for nine years and were at St. Sebastian’s Church in Negombo with their three children at the time of the attack, a family member said.
Mary Otricia Johnson was among the victims at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, the capital. Her eldest daughter, Sharon Silviya, said the family had attended Mass together. Fabiola Fernando, 6, was an elementary school student. In a photo posted to her mother’s Facebook page, she showed off a gold medal, a small smile on her face. Leona Fernando, 4, the middle child in her family, was learning to read and was holding a copy of “Sleeping Beauty” in the picture. Seth Fernando, 11 months, was the newest addition to the Fernando family. He was buried alongside his parents and two sisters.
Around 8:30 a.m., Ms. Silviya’s son asked to see a fish tank at the front of the church. Ms. Johnson, 47, told them to go look. That was the last time they spoke. Minutes later, an enormous blast rang out. Shantha Mayadunne of Sri Lanka, a celebrity chef, was sharing breakfast with her family at the Shangri-La Hotel at the time of the attack. Her daughter Nisanga Mayadunne, who had studied at the University of London, lived in Colombo, the capital.
“People were in pieces,” said Ms. Silviya, 26. “Blood was everywhere. I closed my son’s eyes, took him out, passed him off to a relative and ran back inside to look for my family.” Ravindran Fernando, 61, of Sri Lanka, a restaurant employee who worked near St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, was attending Easter Mass.
Ms. Johnson was bleeding from her nose and eyes; family members tried to lift her off the ground. She was gasping. “I told her, ‘Don’t be scared, just breathe,’” Ms. Silviya recalled. Mary Otricia Johnson, 47, of Sri Lanka, a mother of three from Colombo, was killed at St. Anthony’s Shrine.
Outside, an ambulance attendant told Ms. Silviya that they were too overwhelmed to take Ms. Johnson to the hospital. The family put her in an auto-rickshaw. Five of the victims were Sri Lankan employees at the Cinnamon Grand hotel, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday: M.H.M. Ibrahim, 23, M.N.M. Nisthar, 21, B.A.D.N. Shantha, 50, T.A.A. Yaheya, 36, and G.M.D. Sanjeewani, 35.
Ms. Johnson died on the way. Doctors told the family a large vein had burst, causing internal bleeding. K. Pirathap, 38, of Sri Lanka drove a rickshaw in Colombo. He, his wife, Anashdi, 35, and their two daughters, Antinaa, 7, and Abriyaana, 1, were all killed at St. Anthony’s Shrine. The family was in a celebratory mood at Mass on Sunday: Mr. Pirathap had just purchased a new vehicle.
Shantha Mayadunne was a well-known figure in Sri Lanka, where she had long been a celebrity chef with a cooking show on local television. She offered classes for locals and tourists, and focused on “quick and easy” meals. Berlington Joseph Gomez, 33, and Chandrika Arumugam, 31, both of Sri Lanka, were killed by the blast at St. Anthony’s Shrine along with their three sons: Bevon, 9; Clavon, 6; and Avon, 11 months.
“Even if you have a stable income, and every comfort in the home, there is nothing that can bring a greater feeling between family members than a satisfying meal,” she said in a 2001 interview. Gayani Fernando, of Sri Lanka, was killed along with her husband, Tyronne Gulding, 56, and her mother, Mary Anaslyn Silva.
She and her daughter, Nisanga Mayadunne, were among those killed at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo, according to news reports. Nisanga had studied at the University of London and lived in Colombo, according to her Facebook page. Dileep Roshan, 37, was a Sri Lankan carpenter who left behind a wife and daughter.
Minutes before the attacks, Nisanga Mayadunne posted a family photo with seven wide smiles. “Easter breakfast with family,” she wrote on Facebook. Sneha Savindi, 12, of Sri Lanka, was killed in the bombing at St. Sebastian’s Church, as were Calistas Fernando and two of his family members.
K. Pirathap, an auto-rickshaw driver from Colombo, his wife and their two daughters were also among the dead at St. Anthony’s Shrine. Zayan Chowdhury, an 8-year-old relative of a prominent Bangladeshi politician, had been on vacation with his family.
Mr. Pirathap’s brother, K. Wimalendran, said he received a call Sunday morning from a cousin about a loud explosion. Dhulodh Anthony, 7, was buried at a Methodist cemetery in Negombo.
He tried reaching Mr. Pirathap, 38, who had gone with his family to Mass in a celebratory mood: He had just bought a new vehicle. Jiyasha Sheshani Janz, 12, and her mother, Dineesha Geethani de Vaas, were killed in the blast at St. Sebastian’s Church.
But the call did not go through. Diluk Fernando, 38, of Sri Lanka, was a carpenter and the father of a little girl.
By 9:30 a.m., Mr. Wimalendran was outside St. Anthony’s Shrine, frantically searching for his brother, his sister-in-law, Anashdi, 35, and the couple’s daughters, Antinaa, 7, and Abriyaana, 1. Five members of India’s Janata Dal Secular political party were killed: Gowda Ramesh, K.M. Lakshminarayan, M. Rangappa, K.G. Hanumantharayappa and Sri Hanumaiah Shivakumar.
The police had no answers. They had sealed off the area. Mr. Wimalendran tried a hospital, spending most of the day there. Razeena Khader Kukkady, 68, an Indian, lived in Dubai but had traveled to Colombo to meet her relatives, the BBC reported.
Still, there was no news. A. Maregowda, H. Puttaraju, Vemurai Tulsiram and S.R. Nagaraj were also killed, according to India’s High Commissioner.
Later, he heard that some 40 bodies had been lined up at the church. Mr. Wimalendran waited for officials to finish their work, and then looked for himself. Serhan Selcuk Narici, 34, of Turkey, was an engineer working on a project in Colombo.
He recognized four of them. Yigit Ali Cavus, 25, of Turkey, was also working in the country as an engineer. His body was buried in his home city, Adiyaman, on Tuesday.
Three of the Danish billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen’s four children were among the victims killed in the Colombo attacks, the Danish news media reported. Anita Nicholson, 42, of Britain, a lawyer, was visiting Sri Lanka with her husband and children from their home in Singapore. She and her children, Alex Nicholson, 14, and Annabel Nicholson, 11, were killed while sharing a meal. Their father, Ben, said the children “shared with their mother the priceless ability to light up any room they entered.”
Mr. Povlsen, 46, is the owner of the Bestseller clothing company and the largest landowner in Scotland. He and his wife, Anne, have spoken of “rewilding” thousands of acres across Scotland, and said last week that they would pass the project on to their children in the future. Sally Bradley Harrop, 56, and Billy Harrop, 56, both Britons, were on vacation in Sri Lanka. Mrs. Harrop, a doctor, and Mr. Harrop, a former firefighter from the Manchester area in England, moved to Perth, Australia, in 2012.
In a statement on Monday, Bestseller confirmed the deaths of three of Mr. Povlsen’s four children, but did not say which of them had died. Daniel Linsey, 19, of Britain, was studying at Westminster Kingsway College in London and was vacationing with his family.
The Povlsens are Denmark’s wealthiest family, and they typically keep an extremely low public profile. The precise ages of the four children — Alma, Agnes, Astrid and Alfred — were not widely known. Amelie Linsey, 15, of Britain, attended Godolphin and Latymer School in London and was with her family at the Shangri-La Hotel.
Ravindran Fernando, who worked at a restaurant close to St. Anthony’s Shrine, was killed while attending Mass with his family. Dieter Kowalski, 40, an American, was a Denver resident. He was on a business trip to Sri Lanka for Pearson, an educational media company.
As the service started, Mr. Fernando took a place with his son in the back of the church. His wife, Delicia Fernando, and the couple’s two daughters stood in the front. Kieran Shafritz de Zoysa, 11, an American, was a fifth grader at Sidwell Friends School in Washington. “He was going to do great things,” his father said in an interview with Reuters.
Ms. Fernando recalled hearing a loud explosion and watching the church’s ceiling collapse. “I screamed, ‘My son! My husband!’” she said in an interview. Manik Suriaaratchi of Australia planned to move back to Melbourne with her family next year, her husband told the Australian broadcaster ABC. She and her daughter were killed in the attack.
Her son came running. “Father is there! Father is there!” he yelled. Alexendria Suriaaratchi, 10, of Australia, was attending a church service with her mother at the time of the attack.
At the back of the church, Mr. Fernando was covered in dust and debris. The family carried his body outside and loaded it into an ambulance. He died in the hospital. Rui Lucas, 31, of Portugal, was staying at the Kingsbury hotel in Colombo on his honeymoon after getting married last week, according to Jornal de Notícias, a newspaper in Portugal. His wife survived.
On Monday, Mr. Fernando’s body — dressed in white gloves, a suit and a veil — was brought to his mother’s house near the church. His daughters and wife wailed. Monique Allen, 54, of the Netherlands, was eating breakfast with her son Jason when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives, the BBC reported. Jason survived, as did Ms. Allen’s husband and her two other sons, who were upstairs in their room at the time.
“Why did you go?” one of his daughters cried. “Why did you leave us like this? Wake up! You bought us everything we asked for. You never said no.” Kaori Takahashi, 39, of Japan, led a women’s chapter of a volunteer support group for Japanese expatriates and their families in Sri Lanka. She was eating breakfast at the Shangri-La Hotel with her family, according to NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster.
His son, Franklin, stood next to them, silently holding a picture of his father. Maria Gonzalez Vicente, 32, of Spain, was originally from a small town in Galicia and was on vacation in Sri Lanka with her boyfriend, according to the Spanish news outlet El País.
On Monday morning, parents and students at Sidwell Friends School in Washington learned that a fifth grader there, Kieran Shafritz de Zoysa, was among the victims of the attacks. Alberto Chaves Gómez, 31, of Spain, was also from Galicia but had been working in India and was on vacation in Sri Lanka with his girlfriend.
He had been on a leave of absence from the school this year and living in Sri Lanka, Rachel Kane, the middle school principal, wrote in a letter sent to the students’ families. Ahmed Zain Jaafari and Hani Maged Othman were cabin crew employees on Saudi Arabian Airlines. The airline confirmed their deaths in a statement.
“Kieran was passionate about learning, he adored his friends, and he was incredibly excited about returning to Sidwell Friends,” Ms. Kane wrote. “We are beyond sorry not to get the opportunity to welcome Kieran to the Middle School.” Three of the four children of Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish billionaire, were among the victims, though their names have not yet been released.
Sidwell Friends is an elite 136-year-old Quaker private school with campuses in Washington and Bethesda, Md. Former President Barack Obama’s daughters, Malia and Sasha, both attended, as did Chelsea Clinton. This article will continue to update as more information becomes available.
Five of the victims in the attacks on Sunday were employees at the Cinnamon Grand, one of the hotels that was targeted, a spokeswoman said on Tuesday. Reporting was contributed by Kai Schultz and Aanya Wipulasena from Colombo, Sri Lanka; Daniel Victor and Mike Ives from Hong Kong; Hisako Ueno from Tokyo; Martin Selsoe from Odense, Denmark; Isabella Kwai from Sydney; Megan Specia, Sandra E. Garcia, Jacey Fortin and Niraj Chokshi from New York; and Campbell Robertson from Pittsburgh.
A suicide bomber detonated his explosives at an Easter breakfast buffet at the Cinnamon Grand’s Taprobane restaurant, according to news reports.
The spokeswoman, Tharika Goonathilake, said by telephone that the employees who died in the attack were B.A.D.N. Shantha, 50, T.A.A. Yaheya, 36, G.M.D. Sanjeewani, 35, M.H.M. Ibrahim, 23, and M.N.M. Nisthar, 21.
Ms. Goonathilake said three of the victims — Mr. Yaheya, Mr. Ibrahim and Mr. Nisthar — were Muslims. Mr. Shantha was a Sinhalese Catholic, she added, and Ms. Sanjeewani was a Sinhalese Buddhist.
In a split second, the explosion at the Shangri-La Hotel took away a British man’s family.
Ben Nicholson was sitting at a breakfast table at the hotel restaurant with his wife, Anita, and their children, Alex and Annabel, when the bomb went off.
“Mercifully,” Mr. Nicholson said in a statement, “all three of them died instantly and with no pain or suffering.”
The family was on vacation in Sri Lanka, and had been living in Singapore. Ms. Nicholson, 42, was a lawyer there for Anglo American, a mining company, which confirmed her death.
Alex was 14, and Annabel 11.
From 1998 to 2010, Ms. Nicholson worked as a senior regulatory lawyer for the British government, according to her LinkedIn profile. In Singapore, she was a senior regulatory counsel for BP for three and a half years, then worked for BHP, a mining company, before joining Anglo American.
Photographs on Facebook show the family at Marina Bay in Singapore, and at football games, in front of Christmas trees, in the sea and on a snowy mountain.
“The holiday we had just enjoyed,” Mr. Nicholson said of the Sri Lanka trip, “was a testament to Anita’s enjoyment of travel and providing a rich and colorful life for our family, and especially our children.”
Sunday was a day of ever-increasing dread for friends and family of Dieter Kowalski, a 40-year-old Denver resident who was killed in the attack.
Mr. Kowalski was a senior leader of technical services for Pearson, an educational media company. He was on a business trip to Sri Lanka, where he worked with several engineering teams, according to his LinkedIn profile. It was his second visit to the country in three years, and he was planning to work alongside colleagues with whom he had become friends, said his mother, Inge Kowalski, who lives in Milwaukee.
“He was really happy to go there,” she said. “He was looking forward to the food.”
Arriving in Sri Lanka on a flight that landed several hours late, Mr. Kowalski checked into his hotel, the Cinnamon Grand in Colombo, around 5 a.m., she said.
After the bombs went off, “it was a nightmare,” she said, describing a panicked effort to find him that was reflected in the string of fearful comments beneath his last, cheerful Facebook post. “We spent the whole day yesterday looking for him.”
His family and friends hoped that he had been sleeping, rather than in line at breakfast, when the bomb went off, but no one in the United States or Sri Lanka could track him down.
They discovered that the police had his cellphone, Ms. Kowalski said, and had little luck contacting hospitals. Finally, around 10 p.m., the United States Embassy called with the news they feared most.
Mr. Kowalski went to college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison but moved to Denver over a decade ago, “for the skiing.” His mother said he was single and close to his family — Ms. Kowalski said she had just spent 10 days skiing with him in Colorado, and they had recently bought tickets for a family trip to Majorca, Spain.
“He was a happy guy,” his mother said. “We are all in shock.”
The Indian High Commission in Sri Lanka said that at least 10 Indian citizens had died in the attacks.
At least five were members of the Janata Dal Secular political party who had taken a break in Sri Lanka after working on India’s general election, Reuters reported. The group had been staying at the Shangri-La Hotel in Colombo.
H.D. Kumaraswamy, the party’s leader and the chief minister of Karnataka State in southern India, identified the victims on Twitter as Gowda Ramesh, K.M. Lakshminarayan, M. Rangappa, K.G. Hanumantharayappa and Sri Hanumaiah Shivakumar.
The High Commission said that two of the other Indian victims were Vemurai Tulsiram and S.R. Nagaraj.
Another Indian victim was Razeena Khader Kukkady, 58, who lived in Dubai but had traveled to Colombo to meet her relatives, the BBC reported. She was killed shortly after checking out of the Shangri-La Hotel.
On Tuesday, the High Commission confirmed two more deaths: A. Maregowda and H. Puttaraju.
The United Kingdom Fire Service identified two victims: Billy Harrop, a retired borough commander in the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service; and his wife, Sally, identified in the local news media as Sally Bradley.
Ms. Bradley, a former medical director of a hospital in North Manchester, was a director of clinical services at Rockingham Peel Group, a publicly funded group of hospitals just south of Perth, Australia, where the couple had moved.
“Sally was compassionate, well respected by her colleagues, she was extremely patient-focused,” Kath Smith, the group’s executive director, told the Australian radio station 6PR on Tuesday. “She was extremely serious about her work. But to be so serious about her work, she could be such good fun.”
Mr. Harrop was an emergency services worker when the I.R.A. set off a bomb in Manchester in 1996, wounding hundreds of people, according to The Manchester Evening News.
Australia said two of its citizens, Manik Suriaaratchi and her 10-year-old daughter, were killed on Sunday when a church service was bombed in Negombo, Sri Lanka.
Ms. Suriaaratchi, the founder and managing director of Omega Global, a consulting firm based in Sri Lanka, had moved to the country with her family from Melbourne in 2014.
Her husband, Sudesh Kolonne, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he had been outside St. Sebastian’s Church when it was bombed. He said through tears that his wife and daughter were already dead by the time he ran inside.
Rui Lucas, 31, an electrical engineer, was staying at the Kingsbury hotel in Colombo on his honeymoon after getting married last week, according to Jornal de Notícias, a newspaper in Portugal. His wife survived the attack.
“He was a person with a huge heart, a great friend,” Augusto Teixeira, a co-worker, told the newspaper.
Monique Allen of the Netherlands was among those killed in the attack on the Cinnamon Grand hotel in Colombo.
Ms. Allen had been eating breakfast with her son Jason when a suicide bomber detonated his explosives, the BBC reported. Jason survived, as did Ms. Allen’s husband and her two other sons, who were all upstairs in their room at the time.
“She was very kind, very selfless,” her husband, Lewis, told the BBC. “She always thought of herself last.”
Kaori Takahashi had been eating breakfast at the Shangri-La Hotel with her family, according to NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster. Her husband was wounded but survived the attack.
Ms. Takahashi had been in charge of public relations for the women’s chapter of a volunteer support group for Japanese expatriates and their families in Sri Lanka, according to the group’s website. The Asahi Shimbun newspaper reported that she was in her 30s.
Ahmed Zain Jaafari and Hani Maged Othman, both cabin crew employees at Saudi Arabian Airlines, were among the victims of the attacks, the airline said in a statement on Tuesday.
The two men had been in transit in Colombo and were staying at one of the hotels that were targeted, according to a report on Monday by Arab News, one of Saudi Arabia’s state-controlled newspapers.
“All of us mourn for Ahmed and Hani, who are brothers for eternity, and our hearts are filled with pain for the indescribable loss that their families are facing,” the airline’s director general, Saleh bin Nasser al-Jasser, said in the statement.
The airline said in a separate statement that its staff typically stayed at the Cinnamon Grand during visits to Colombo, according to a report by Gulf News, an English-language newspaper based in the United Arab Emirates.
Serhan Selcuk Narici and Yigit Ali Cavus had been working on a project in Sri Lanka, the English-language Daily Sabah newspaper reported, citing the state-owned Anadolu Agency. The report did not say where they had been killed.
The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, confirmed the victims’ names. A Facebook page that appeared to be Mr. Narici’s said he moved to Colombo in March 2017.
Zayan Chowdhury, an 8-year-old relative of a prominent Bangladeshi politician, was among those killed in one of the hotel blasts, the Bangladeshi news media reported. The Dhaka Tribune newspaper said that he had been in Colombo on vacation with his family.
Zayan was the grandson of Sheikh Fazlul Karim Selim, who is the leader of Bangladesh’s governing Awami League political party and a cousin of the country’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina.
When the blast hit, Zayan was having breakfast on the ground floor of a hotel with his father, Mashiul Haque Chowdhury, the online newspaper bdnews24.com reported. The boy’s mother and younger brother were in their hotel room.
The Dhaka Tribune reported that Zayan’s father was injured in the blast and admitted to a hospital.