Dubai Man Who Survived Sri Lanka Colombo Blasts, Also Was Present in Mumbai During 26/11

A Dubai based Indian couple escaped blast in Sri Lanka capital, the couple was at Cinnamon Grand Hotel in Colombo, which was one of the eight places where bombings took place.

Abhinav Chari and his wife, Navroop K. Chari were in the island nation for a business trip where a bomb had gone off in the Easter Sunday. This was the second time Abinav had survived a terrorist attack.

He was in Mumbai in 2008 when terrorists carried out a series of 12 coordinated shooting and bombing attacks.

In an interview, Abhinav said that it’s twice that he has travelled out of the UAE and at both occasions, he witnessed hate crimes at places he was in. First being in Mumbai and second Colombo.

Speaking of Sri Lanka experience, Chari said, ”On Easter Sunday, we went to church. In the middle of the service, the priest made an announcement, requesting people to leave the church premises.

“After we left the church we got into a taxi to go get some breakfast because that is what we would normally do after Easter mass. We started noticing a commotion on the roads and decided it was better to go back to the hotel. “When we reached there we saw everyone out on the lawn. We thought it was just some sort of security protocol”.

Abhinav’s wife told Gulf News:

“It was too soon to know anything on the news or social media, we still hadn’t registered the scale of the incident. I could not believe what was happening in front of us. It was all like a movie…”

The deadly bombings that targeted churches and hotels, most of them in Colombo, claimed the lives of 253 people and injured over 500 others, in the bloodiest attacks in Sri Lanka since the civil war ended a decade ago.