New Zealand’s foreign minister has slammed the Sri Lankan government’s early attempts to paint the Easter Sunday terror attacks in Colombo and Batticaloa as reprisals for the massacre of 50 Muslims by a white supremacist in Auckland earlier this year.
“It’s a slightly cheap shot, I suppose, to try to explain it away. Let’s see the evidence,” foreign minister Winston Peters told Sky News.
Noting that most experts were of the view that the Sri Lanka attacks would have been planned well in advance of the Auckland massacre, the foreign minister suggested that the link between the two had been made in the first place to distract from the Sri Lankan government’s failure to prevent the plot.
The comments linking Auckland with the Sri Lankan attacks had initially been made by junior defence minister Ruwan Wijewardane, although he had declined to provide evidence.
