How to know when to act?

Last Sunday suicide bombers attacked 3 Christian churches across Sri Lanka and 3 luxury hotels in the capital Colombo. At first 359 people were feared to have died in the blasts but that figure has been revised down to 253. This is perhaps the only 'good mistake' to come out of a tragedy that should and could have been avoided, wherein both the president and the prime minister were not informed about at least 3 warnings from India. Seven suspects are still on the run although 3 of them could be among 15 people, including 6 children, killed in a shootout yesterday. Sri Lankan police are not as incompetent as has been made out in the media. In January, they discovered 100 kg of high powered explosives buried in a coconut farm and arrested 4 people. There are those who argue that poverty is the root cause of terrorism, but here a wealthy family was behind the attacks. 33 year-old Inshaf Ibrahim, who blew himself up in Shangri-La hotel, owned a copper factory. The father Mohamed Ibrahim is a wealthy spice trader. The pregnant wife of one of the brothers detonated a suicide vest, killing her 2 children and 3 policemen. Sri Lanka has a long history of violence. A civil war between Hindu Tamils and the majority Buddhist Sinhalese lasted from 1983 to 2009, when the army vanquished the Tamils by slaughtering over 40,000 civilians and shooting Tamil leader Prabhakaran's wife, daughter and son in cold blood. The 12-year old boy was given some chocolate and then shot at close range. Suicide bombing was invented by the Tamils and used to assassinate Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Would the army take a similar approach to Muslims remains to be seen. After the Mumbai attacks in 2008, the Multi-Agency Center (MAC) within the Intelligence Bureau was revamped but it missed the suicide bombing at Pulwama in Kashmir in February, which killed 40 soldiers. "On a typical day, the MAC generates 10-15 alerts but when a big event takes place or in a packed election season, the number of alerts can go up to 100,000 per year." Clearly, it would take enormous manpower at great expense to follow up each piece of information, which is impossible, but they do a tremendous job by preventing a a lot of "lone-wolf or ISIS scale attacks within the country". India had warnings of the Mumbai attacks, "But the Indian Navy did not find the intelligence actionable enough and the Mumbai police believed, after the attacks started, that it was witnessing gang warfare, not a terror attack," wrote S Gupta. According to a book published recently, Jesus was a scholar who lived among the Nagas in the east of India and was abducted by a UFO, according to one Chan Thomas. The CIA censored the book for 50 years. Did they classify this as top-secret intelligence?