The Central Bank of Sri Lanka stood as the nerve center of the island's economy, a seaside high-rise managing most of the nation's financial operations. The neighborhood around it was dense with small shops, street vendors, and office workers beginning their day. The lorry that crashed the gate was followed by a three-wheeler carrying two armed LTTE cadres with automatic rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, providing covering fire as the suicide bomber completed his mission. The explosion ripped through the bank building and damaged eight structures nearby. Most of the dead and injured were not bankers or soldiers but bystanders: shopkeepers, pedestrians, people who happened to be near the wrong building at the wrong moment.

The bombing was the work of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the separatist group fighting for an independent Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka's north and east. Though the LTTE publicly denied responsibility, the Sri Lankan government blamed them immediately. Investigators determined the bombers had traveled from Jaffna, in the far north of the country. The attack represented a deliberate escalation, carrying the war from the rural battlefields and northern frontlines directly into the heart of the capital. Among the wounded were two American citizens, six Japanese nationals, and one Dutch citizen. The international casualties underscored a message the LTTE intended to broadcast: no one in Colombo was safe.

The economic damage extended far beyond the shattered buildings. Combined with another LTTE bombing that July, which killed more than 70 people on a commuter train, the attack caused tourism to Sri Lanka to plummet by 40 percent. The front organization Ellalan Force called travel agencies and tourists directly, urging them to boycott the island. For a country whose economy depended heavily on visitors drawn to its beaches, ancient cities, and hill country, the financial blow compounded the human one. Until 2006, the Central Bank bombing remained the deadliest single LTTE attack of the entire civil war.

Eleven LTTE members were eventually charged in connection with the bombing, ten indicted on a staggering 712 counts, including murder, destruction of state property, and incitement to violence. Two of the three attackers survived and were taken into custody with the help of ordinary citizens who identified them. In 2002, Judge Sarath Ambepitiya issued an open warrant for the arrest of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the supreme leader of the LTTE, in connection with the attack. Found guilty in absentia on 51 counts, Prabhakaran was sentenced to 200 years in prison. He would never serve a day of it; Prabhakaran was killed in 2009 during the final military offensive that ended the civil war.

Colombo's Fort district, where the bank stood, has rebuilt itself many times over. The Central Bank of Sri Lanka still operates from the area, and the neighborhood has regained the commercial bustle that characterized it before 1996. But for those who were there that January morning, the memory is permanent. The bombing sits within a longer arc of violence that defined Sri Lanka for a generation, from the anti-Tamil pogroms of 1983 through nearly three decades of civil war that killed an estimated 100,000 people. The 91 who died at the Central Bank were civilians caught in a conflict most of them had no power to stop.