Terror in Sri Lanka; USCG vs. China; Border confusion; Does FBI face-recognition work?; And a bit more.
The day after in Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan President Maithrela Sirisena has invoked emergency powers in the wake of Sunday’s “devastating bomb attacks on hotels and churches, blamed on militants with foreign links, in which 290 people were killed and nearly 500 wounded,” Reuters reports from the capital of Colombo.
“One of the attackers “waited patiently in a queue for the Easter Sunday breakfast buffet at Sri Lanka's Cinnamon Grand hotel before setting off explosives strapped to his back,” Agence France-Presse reports. “The explosions — mostly in or around Colombo, the capital — collapsed ceilings and blew out windows, killing worshippers and hotel guests in one scene after another of smoke, soot, blood, broken glass, screams and wailing alarms,” the Associated Press adds.
What police and soldiers can do now: “detain and interrogate suspects without court orders,” Reutes writes. Those powers begin at midnight tonight.
Background: "Sri Lanka, off the southern tip of India, is about 70% Buddhist," AP writes. "In recent years, tensions have been running high between hard-line Buddhist monks and Muslims." In addition, "Sri Lanka was at war for decades with ethnic minority Tamil separatists, most of them Hindu, but violence had largely ended since the government victory in the civil war, 10 years ago," Reuters notes.
Government officials are under fire in the island country, AP reports after news broke that “International intelligence agencies warned of the attacks several times starting April 4.” Five days later, the defense ministry warned police about the militants of the National Thowfeek Jamaath, the group believed to be behind Sunday’s attack. Two days after that, police “wrote to the heads of security of the judiciary and diplomatic security division” about NTJ. So far, it’s “not immediately clear what action, if any, was taken in response.”
All of the bombers were Sri Lankan citizens, Health Minister Rajitha Senaratne told reporters, “but authorities suspect foreign links,” AP writes. Reuters writes “International anti-terrorism experts said even if a local group had carried out the attacks, it was likely that al Qaeda or Islamic State were involved, given the level of sophistication.”
The U.S. Navy’s 7th Fleet cut short a training exercise with Sri Lankan forces, CNN’s Barbara Starr tweeted Sunday.
So far investigators have found dozens of detonators and a couple large pipe bombs — including one “filled with 50 kilograms (110 pounds) of explosives” and “large enough to have caused damage in a 400-meter (400-yard) radius,” Sri Lankan Air Force Group Captain Gihan Seneviratne said this morning. More here.
From Defense One
The French Ambassador Is Retiring. Here’s What He Really Thinks About Washington. // Yara Bayoumy via The Atlantic: Gérard Araud says that Trump is right about trade. Kushner is “extremely smart” but has “no guts.” And John Bolton’s not so bad, actually.
Say Freeze? FBI’s Facial Recognition Accuracy Unmeasured For Three Years, Warns Watchdog // Jack Corrigan via NextGov: GAO says the FBI has implemented none of its six key recommendations made in 2016, and questions the bureau’s use of facial recognition in criminal investigations.
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Thanks for reading! And if you’re not subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 1952, the first broadcast of a nuclear test was carried live by Los Angeles-based KTLA from Nevada’s Yucca Flat.
The Trump administration is escalating its feud with Iran, but it’s reportedly taking military intervention off the table. This morning the White House ended wavers to eight countries regarding Iranian oil production beginning May 2. The move was made in coordination with the governments of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Find the full WH statement on the decision, here. Read background on the decision via WaPo’s Josh Rogin, here. Read about the call to remove war from the list of consideration, via Axios, here.
Vigilante-ism rising? A former U.S. Marine was arrested Friday in connection with the mysterious raid of North Korea’s Embassy in Madrid, Spain, the Washington Post reported.
The person in question: Christopher Ahn, “a former U.S. Marine and a member of Free Joseon, a group dedicated to the overthrow of North Korea’s Kim Dynasty… He appeared in a federal-district court in Los Angeles on Friday where his attorney requested that the case be sealed,” a request that the judge granted.
Reminder of what happened: “The brazen daylight raid [of that North Korean embassy in Madrid back] in February came just five days before President Trump met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi, and raised questions about whether it was the work of government intelligence services.”
Now Ahn’s arrest marks a “dramatic turn of fate for the revolutionary group,” the Post writes, “which sought to assist U.S. authorities by handing over computers and other items stolen from the North Korean embassy that it characterized as potentially having ‘enormous’ intelligence value.” Read on, here.
The FBI arrested New Mexico’s border vigilante leader, Larry Mitchell Hopkins, The Daily Beast reported Saturday. The bureau nabbed him “on charges of possessing firearms and ammunition as a convicted felon.” (He has an arrest from 2006 on similar grounds, Reuters reports.)
“This is a dangerous felon who should not have weapons around children and families,” said New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas in a statement Saturday. “Today’s arrest by the FBI indicates clearly that the rule of law should be in the hands of trained law enforcement officials, not armed vigilantes.”
Said a spox for Hopkins’s outfit, The United Constitutional Patriots: “There’s no question about whether or not we work with Border Patrol.”
CBP’s reax: “U.S. Customs and Border Protection does not endorse private groups or organizations taking enforcement matters into their own hands,” a spox told TDB. As well, “PayPal and GoFundMe announced Friday that they would no longer allow UCP to raise funds on their platforms.” Hopkins is expected in federal court today. More from the Washington Post, here.
Also at the border: Mexican soldiers questioned and disarmed two U.S. Army soldiers who were apparently confused about the location of the actual border nine days ago, Newsweek’s Jim LaPorta reported this weekend after getting his hands on a copy of a “serious incident report.”Location: Near Clint, Texas, where "the border fence does not align perfectly with the topography of the precise location of the U.S.-Mexico border," leaving essentially "a buffer zone between the actual, often invisible, border and the fence."
Read the rest of what happened, and how the U.S. soldiers “did not have enough reaction time to activate a 911 emergency on their Nano Shout, a cell-phone size two-way satellite GPS tracking device,” here.
Former Marine officer gets lost in real-world land-nav. LaPorta flagged a clip made for social media by California Republican Rep. Duncan Hunter, a former Marine major. In the video, Hunter “believes he’s crossing the border wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The problem? He was still at least 75 ft. away” from that border, said Customs and Border Protection.
The U.S. Coast Guard is playing a larger role in countering China in Asian waters. Senior officials said the service is “increasingly orienting itself toward China” through more frequent deployments in the Western Pacific, including “dispatching service members to countries such as Vietnam and Sri Lanka to help train those nations’ coast guards,” according to the Washington Post.
Granted, China has long used its own coast guard to further its attempts to claim territory and coerce its neighbors. As Naval War College prof Andrew Erickson puts it — quoting a (precocious) five-year-old of his acquaintance: “China has three navies: the regular navy, the police navy and the sneaky navy.” Those terms refer to China’s navy, coast guard, and maritime militia — each the largest of its kind, by sheer hull numbers, in the world. Read, here.
Turkey: We’ll look to Russia if we can’t buy F-35. That’s what unnamed Turkish officials repeated to Defense News last week; e.g., a defense procurement official said “geostrategic assessment” would make Russian options emerge as the natural first replacement. Read, here.
U.S. could retaliate for a cyber attack on Japan, Pompeo says. Stripes, on Friday: “The United States and Japan affirmed that international law applies in cyberspace and that a cyberattack could, in certain circumstances, constitute an armed attack under Article 5 of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty,” the U.S. Secretary of State told reporters in Washington, D.C. More, here.
And finally this morning: A comedian who played a president on TV is now President of Ukraine. Volodymyr Zelensky, who ran on an anti-corruption platform, received 73% of the vote— well above the 24% share for incumbent Petro Poroshenko, the BBC reports.
On Zelensky’s agenda: “rebooting peace talks with the separatists fighting Ukrainian forces and volunteers in the east… and head towards concluding a ceasefire.” Vox has a tiny bit more about Zelensky, here. Otherwise, early indications suggest Ukraine’s economy is ticking up thanks to the election news, Financial Times reports this morning.