Blew up motorcycles, lost fingers: How Lanka bombers trained for the attack

Authorities cite evidence that local planners followed terror group's designs from the internet to build bombs used in a series of suicide bombings that left more than 250 people dead

The devastating Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka were locally planned and executed, without direct guidance from the Islamic State militant group, investigators said.

Two Sri Lankan Muslim extremists learned how to build the explosive devices that killed more than 250 people in churches and hotels by studying Islamic State designs on the internet and conducting trial-and-error tests, including one that cost a bomb maker several fingers last year, people involved in the probe said.

One plotter, Ilhan Ibrahim, the radicalised son of a wealthy Colombo spice trader, appears to have financed and organized the six nearly simultaneous attacks largely