The true toll of Sunday’s attacks in Sri Lanka was starting to come into focus on Monday, as family members, government officials and news reports offered the first glimpse of the people who lost their lives.
Officials have confirmed citizens from at least eight countries, including the United States, were killed in the attacks.
Information about Sri Lankan victims was sparse, but the names of some foreign victims began to appear in the international news media, a few of which The Times was able to confirm. We will update this article as we learn more about the people who died.
[Follow the latest updates on the bombing and the response here, including the current death toll.]
Celebrity chef and her daughter
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.
“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.
She and her daughter, Nisanga Mayadunne, were among those killed at the Shangri-La Hotel, in the capital, Colombo, according to news reports. Nisanga studied at the University of London and lived in Colombo, according to her Facebook page.
Minutes before the attacks, Nisanga Mayadunne posted a family photo with seven wide smiles. “Easter breakfast with family,” she wrote on Facebook.
Visitors at the Shangri-La Hotel
As of Monday, the identities of two other people who died in the bombings at the Shangri-La Hotel were known.
One of them, K.G. Hanumantharayappa, was a businessman from the southern Indian city of Bangalore who had only been in Sri Lanka for a few days, his nephew, Rajath, said by telephone. Mr. Hanumantharayappa was among five Indian victims of the attacks who had been identified as of Monday afternoon by Indian officials.
Another victim, Kaori Takahashi, was a Japanese woman who 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.
The hotel also said on Facebook that three employees, whom it did not identify, had been killed in the attack.
Three children of a Danish billionaire
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.
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.
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.
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.
A technical services leader from Denver
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.”
Two Turkish engineers
Two of the victims were Turkish engineers who 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.
Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, confirmed the victims’ names as Serhan Selcuk Narici and Yigit Ali Cavus. A Facebook page that appeared to be Mr. Narici’s said he had moved to Colombo in March 2017.
A Bangladeshi politician’s young relative
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/world/asia/sri-lanka-victims.html
2019-04-22 14:48:45Z
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