COLOMBO: Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena yesterday announced a ban on face covering, a week after Islamist militants carried out coordinated suicide bombings that killed 253 people. Sirisena said he was using emergency powers to ban any form of face covering in public. The restriction will take effect from today, his office said in a statement. "The ban is to ensure national security… No one should obscure their faces to make identification difficult," the statement said.

It came days after local Islamic clerics urged Muslim women not to cover their faces amid fears of a backlash after the bombings carried out by jihadists affiliated to the Islamic State group. Muslims in the majority Buddhist nation account for about 10 percent of its 21 million population. Most Sri Lankan Muslims practice a liberal form of the religion and only a small number of women wear the niqab.

Police and a relative said yesterday the father and two brothers of the suspected mastermind of Sri Lanka's Easter Sunday bombings were killed when security forces stormed their safe house on the east coast two days ago. Zainee Hashim, Rilwan Hashim and their father Mohamed Hashim, who appear in a video circulating on social media calling for all-out war against non-believers, were among at least 15 killed in a fierce gun battle with the military on the east coast on Friday.

Kamal Jayanathdhi, the officer in charge at Kalmunai police station on the east coast, confirmed the three men had died along with a child that appears in the video, and that the undated clip in which they discuss martyrdom, had been shot in the same house where the gun battle took place. Two people who were inside the house, a woman and a seven-year-old girl believed to be relatives of the men, survived, he said, while a woman was killed in crossfire on a nearby street.

Niyaz Sharif, the brother-in-law of Zahran Hashim, the suspected ringleader of the wave of Easter Sunday bombings, told Reuters the video showed Zahran's two brothers and father. On Sunday police in the eastern town of Kattankudy raided a mosque founded by Zahran which doubled up as the headquarters of his group, the National Thawheedh Jamaath (NTJ). - Agencies