Immediately after the suicide attacks last Sunday, Sri Lanka saw a sudden influx of foreign correspondents arriving to cover the latest attacks that were attributed to the Islamic State terrorists.
The first media group to reach the information Department emergency Desk which was opened to register the teams arriving to cover the tragedy was from the UK’s Daily Mail, a spokesman for the Information Department said.
Their Delhi based correspondent was shipped to Sri Lanka within hours to capture the first shots of the Easter Sunday disaster.
By Thursday 5.00 pm a total of 72 journalists representing newspapers, TV stations and web-based outlets from all over the world were here to report the tragedy which saw over 250 civilians killed with 40 foreign tourists and over 500 injured.
The interest was further enhanced when reports said that there were several high profile people among the victims of the terror attacks, one of which was a Fashion Tycoon from Denmark.
The number of foreign journalists shot up to 98, by Saturday (26) with several more teams expected to arrive late last evening. Among the biggest media outlets here to report was Sky News, BBC, Al-Jazeera, India’s NDTV, NBC, the Times Group, Washington Post, Sun, Asahi Shimbun, NHK, Daily Telegraph UK’s Daily Mirror, Getty Images and India Today.
The biggest media contingents were posted here from AFP, Al-Jazeera and a few other organisations. AFP’s correspondents from the UK, USA and Malaysia
were drawn here to cover the attacks in addition to their local team.