'It was panic mode': Eyewitness caught up in Sri Lanka bombings

Relatives of a blast victim weep outside a police morgue in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Photo / AP

Bhanuka Harischandra was running a little late for his meeting.

As a car carrying him pulled into the back entrance of the luxury Shangri-La Hotel in Sri Lanka's capital of Colombo, he realised something was wrong.

People were telling him not to come in, it wasn't safe. Still, the car pulled around to the front of the hotel and Harischandra saw the aftermath of a bombing.

People were being evacuated, others were being dragged. Blood and ambulances were everywhere.

"It was panic mode," Harischandra, a 24-year-old founder of a tech marketing company, said by telephone later in the day. "I didn't process it for a while."

He decided to go to the Cinnamon Grand Hotel, where he thought it would be safe. But just after he was dropped at the luxury hotel and about to enter the building, he heard another bomb go off.

Now he was being evacuated. Soot and ash fell on his white sweat shirt.

His car had left, so he hailed a motorised rickshaw and went to meet friends at a coffee shop. They contacted other friends, trying to make sure everyone they knew was safe.
It was too soon to think about what it might mean.

Over the course of the day, eight bombs exploded at churches and luxury hotels in and near Colombo, killing more than 200 people. The Easter Sunday violence was the deadliest the South Asian island country has seen since a bloody civil war ended a decade ago.

Many Sri Lankans remember well the terror of the 26-year war. But not Harischandra, who was just a teenager when it officially ended.

In the past years, conflict was far from Colombo. Growing up, he was mostly aware of his parents' anxiety about safety, not of actual fighting.

Now their anxiety is back.

"For them, it's a bit of a different situation," he said. "They're afraid this might start racial violence."

Today, he was with his family, observing a curfew. He said there was "a lot of tension" in the air, but he was also hoping that the worst might be over: It had been a few hours since the last blast.

Harischandra was heartened by the fact that his social media feed was flooded with photos of the lines of people waiting to give blood. Lines so long "you can't see the end."

-AP