1996 Dehiwala train bombing

On July 24, 1996, during the rush hour, a commuter train near Dehiwala railway station in Colombo, Sri Lanka, was attacked with suitcase bombs placed in four carriages. The bombs exploded simultaneously, causing 64 civilian deaths and wounding approximately 400 others. The attack has been attributed to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

According to the Sri Lanka Army, the tactic of detonating multiple bombs simultaneously across several carriages of a train had been used previously by the LTTE in January 1985, when the Yal Devi Colombo–Jaffna train was bombed.

In the aftermath of the bombing, on July 25, 1996, the United States State Department and the European Union issued statements condemning the attack on the Dehiwela railway station in Colombo and called on the LTTE to renounce the use of terrorism. That same month, the Indian government extended its ban on the LTTE, designating it an unlawful association under section 3 of India's Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.

The 1996 Dehiwala train bombing is noted as distinct from a separate, later 2008 Dehiwala train bombing. No named individuals have been publicly charged or convicted in connection with this specific attack according to available source material.

This dossier is based primarily on a Wikipedia summary of the incident, which itself cites contemporaneous reporting from BBC News and coverage archived via hindu.com as external reference material for the broader Sri Lankan conflict timeline. Those two sources are included here as corroborating references per the case record, though their specific content was not independently retrieved or quoted for this dossier; the descriptive text above draws solely from the Wikipedia article text provided.