Colombo central bus station bombing
Terrorist attack by the LTTE
The Colombo central bus station bombing was the car bombing of the central bus terminal of Colombo carried out on April 21, 1987, in Pettah, Colombo, Sri Lanka. The 80-pound (36 kg) bomb killed at least 113 people and left a 10-foot (3 m) crater in the ground. The New York Times estimated 200 people had been injured.
The bombing, which was chosen specifically to land on the time of the day in order to harm as many people as possible, produced an enormous explosion that could be heard ten miles away. Six buses were trapped in the attack, causing numerous passengers to die in the fire as their buses burned. Heavy rainfall delayed rescue workers from arriving to the scene at time. Heaps of victims, including old people and children lay on the ground in agony before they were received by authorities.
The Bank of Ceylon Pettah branch was also heavily damaged during the attack. The attack had been attributed to the Tamil militant groups, EROS and the LTTE.
Aftermath
After the bombing, strict security measures were undertaken, including a curfew on the entire district, and the army prevented people from entering the areas affected by the attack.
In the immediate aftermath, Sinhalese mobs rioted across the streets of Colombo, pulling over cars to see if there were Tamils inside.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Colombo central bus station bombing” as terrorist attack by the LTTE. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5060488. Authority coordinates are 6.935, 79.855. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1987.
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This entry incorporates text from “Colombo central bus station bombing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.