Sri Lanka has banned face coverings in public, following a spate of suicide attacks on Easter Sunday that killed at least 250 people and injured hundreds. President Maithripala Sirisena said he was using an emergency law to impose the restriction from Monday. Any face garment which "hinders identification" will be banned to ensure security, his office said. Muslim leaders criticised the move. he niqab and burka - worn by Muslim women - were not specifically named.The move is perceived as targeting those garments, however Sri Lanka remains on high alert eight days after Islamist attacks that hit churches and hotels. Ranil Wickremesinghe told the Guardian that investigators were trying to understand why Islamic State-linked terrorist cell that killed at least 253 people had such a large quantity of explosives they were yet to use, some of which had been dumped in safe houses across the country. “Were they keeping [the explosives] for numbers to build up? Maybe this [the Easter Sunday attacks] would spark off other people joining the cause. There would have been people to give them explosives,” Wickremesinghe said on Friday evening at his prime ministerial residence in Colombo. Wickremesinghe confirmed that one of Sunday’s bombers, the British-educated Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed, had failed to detonate his explosives in the Taj Samudra hotel as he had planned. He retreated to a guesthouse where he had been staying and accidentally killed himself and two others while he was trying to repair the device. “He was trying to fix it and the whole thing exploded,” Wickremesinghe said. Wickremesinghe said the “paralysis in the system” that prevented the intelligence from being taken seriously would be investigated, but the first priority was the immediate danger the country still faced. “First focus on getting this under control and then we can spend all our time investigating, but first get this under control,” he said. The fugitive Islamic State leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has appeared in a propaganda video for the first time in five years, in which he recognises the terror group’s defeat in the Syrian town of Baghuz. The appearance is only Baghdadi’s second on video, and comes weeks after the remnants of Isis were ousted from their last organised stronghold in the eastern Syrian desert. Looking heavier than when he proclaimed the existence of the now collapsed caliphate in mid-2014, Baghdadi blames its demise on the “savagery” of Christians. Sri Lanka has banned face coverings in public, following a spate of suicide attacks on Easter Sunday that killed at least 250 people and injured hundreds. President Maithripala Sirisena said he was using an emergency law to impose the restriction from Monday. Any face garment which "hinders identification" will be banned to ensure security, his office said. Muslim leaders criticised the move. he niqab and burka - worn by Muslim women - were not specifically named.The move is perceived as targeting those garments, however Sri Lanka remains on high alert eight days after Islamist attacks that hit churches and hotels. Ranil Wickremesinghe told the Guardian that investigators were trying to understand why Islamic State-linked terrorist cell that killed at least 253 people had such a large quantity of explosives they were yet to use, some of which had been dumped in safe houses across the country. “Were they keeping [the explosives] for numbers to build up? Maybe this [the Easter Sunday attacks] would spark off other people joining the cause. There would have been people to give them explosives,” Wickremesinghe said on Friday evening at his prime ministerial residence in Colombo. Wickremesinghe confirmed that one of Sunday’s bombers, the British-educated Abdul Lathief Jameel Mohamed, had failed to detonate his explosives in the Taj Samudra hotel as he had planned. He retreated to a guesthouse where he had been staying and accidentally killed himself and two others while he was trying to repair the d